A widespread internet outage hit and affected multiple companies last Thursday, July 21, 2021 in the early afternoon, but was back up and running smoothly in a very short period of time.
The root cause of the outage appeared to be a failure in Akamai’s Edge DNS Service. This basically means a website visit can’t be made without first accessing a Domain Name Server (DNS). It means that the decentralized naming systems responsible for turning hostnames in IP address fails to respond.
The outage had DownDetector.com covered in warnings for popular websites and services such as Airbnb, AT&T, Amazon, Delta, FedEx, Fidelity Investments, Google, HBO Max, Home Depot, LastPass, PlayStation Network, Steam, Verizon, UPS, and probably many others, were impacted across the country and especially in major cities like New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago according to DownDetector.com.
According to Akama, at the time of the problem a fix was implemented in a very short time and normal operations had been obtained. Akamai also stated that the unspecified issue was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform, and had not further explanation as of press time.
“Based on current observations, the service resumed to normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated,” a spokesperson said.
The volume of large-scale Internet outages seems only to be increasing, with some of the world’s largest sites often the most heavily impacted. Last week’s outage resulted from a DNS failure rather than a content delivery network failure.
The internet was originally designed to be decentralized and fault-resistant, but as the world’s biggest sites and services coalesce around a few massive infrastructure providers, failures at those providers have increasingly significant effects on the internet ecosystem as a whole.
