Recently the content distribution network Akamai crashed. And this crash hit several large websites at once!
According to Akamai’s Twitter, the crash occurred at about noon ET 22 July, and by 1:00 p.m. ET they had completely eliminated the problem. Akamai apologized to everyone for the inconvenience, which led to a period of ‘downtime’ in most companies and lasted for about an hour, CNBC informs.
The cause of the issue was an undetected bug that appeared in a software update that was downloaded earlier by large organizations. They said on their website that the company would continue to investigate all the details related to the Edge DNS service outrage.
The list of Akamai's affected customers included Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Capital One, Go Daddy, Vanguard, UPS, LastPass, AT&T, Oracle and Costco. In addition to the inability to use a number of virtual services, this failure also caused problems in the offline world. For example, Delta Air Lines’ customers were unable to check-in for their flights until Akamai corrected the problem.
Further to this, some of Oracle’s services were unavailable due to the crash. But, some of their products, that run solely on their own cloud service, were not affected at all, which further highlighted that the problem lay with Akamai.
Websites use the DNS systems of Akamai to help them determine the correct IP addresses they need, so that they can navigate to user-defined websites. In addition, the Akamai system protects users from attacks (Denial of Service and DDoS attacks).