There was a part in the early Thursday evening of the Internet for about an hour. Some of the largest websites in the world were temporarily unavailable. Akamai Technologies, the company responsible for the massive Internet failure in the meantime, finally announced that the error had been fixed. Now precautions should be taken to ensure that such a failure cannot happen again. The company also apologized. According to Akamai Technologies, it was not a cyber attack.
The list of failed platforms reads like a who’s who of the modern Internet. It ranges from Amazon and its AWS services to gaming platforms such as Steam and EA to big players such as Microsoft, Airbnb and Evernote as well as German news sites such as tagesschau.de. This is reported by the Independent with a note from the Downdetector portal.
Error in the DNS system triggered an internet failure
Apparently to blame is a bug in the Edge DNS service at Akamai. The Domain Name System coordinates website addresses and their IP addresses. If a DNS server does not work, the assignment no longer works. Akamai optimizes the load distribution of web content and serves as a higher-level cloud service for around 3,500 business customers, including Microsoft, Facebook and various authorities and platforms.
According to Akamai, the software configuration was updated at 5:46 p.m. German time triggered an error in the DNS system. This is the system that directs browsers to websites. Akamai Technologies announced on Twitter that this bug led to a disruption that affected the availability of some customer websites. After the update was reset, the services would have resumed normal operation after about an hour.
