Various major web services suffered due to an outage caused by cloud services provider Akamai Technologies DNS service.
Content Delivery Platform, Akamai Technologies gave an alert on an “Edge DNS” service incident, noting a “partial outage” on its website and said it was scrutinizing the issue. Huge parts of the Internet including Zomato, Paytm, Disney+ Hotstar, Sony LIV, Paytm, PlayStation Network (PSN), and Steam were suddenly shut down for many users around the world.
About an hour into the outage, it started being reported, Internet infrastructure provider Akamai confirmed that it is facing an outage. According to the Internet outage tracker DownDetector, the outage seems to have started at around 8.55 pm on Thursday evening.
Within five minutes, the number of reports from people unable to access Zomato alone stood at around 3,000. There were similar scenes playing out with a number of other services too.
The outage lasted for over an hour, from 15:46 to 17:09 UTC, and was caused due to a configuration update set off a DNS bug, which obstructed customer websites including Zomato, Paytm, Steam, American Airlines, Fox News, HSBC, and many more. The problem was rectified by rolling back the software update.
It was an error, not an attack
A fallacy was perceived that the disruptions were caused due to an attack but the managed service providers clarified saying “At 15:46 UTC today, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting the availability of some customer websites,” according to the short Akamai statement on Twitter.
“The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services recommenced usual operations.”
Akamai also recapitulated that the problem was not caused by any attack on its systems.
Nevertheless, this is the 2nd outage that has happened since June, it won’t be wrong to say that these disruptions are emerging to be common very lately questioning the reliability of single cloud support.