Businesses, California government websites down briefly during major internet outage
Numerous major websites experienced technical problems Thursday morning, apparently linked to a service disruption at a major content distribution network.
Akamai, which provides data resources for many websites, said in updates to Twitter and its website shortly after 9 a.m. that it was investigating an “emerging issue” with its Domain Name System service, called Edge DNS.
A number of major companies use Edge DNS for their websites, including Amazon, AT&T, Delta Air Lines, UPS and Capital One, all of which were reportedly down or running slowly earlier in the morning. As of 10 a.m., those businesses’ websites appeared to be back up and running.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” Akamai tweeted just after 9:45 a.m.
In California, eight state government websites were briefly knocked offline.
“Akamai’s outage impacted Cal Fire and seven other state government websites,” California Department of Technology spokeswoman Amy Norris said in an emailed statement. “The state of California chooses vendor managed services that have backups and redundancy built into their service offerings. This architecture is why Akamai was able to recover quickly and minimize impact to their nationwide customer base including the state’s websites.”
State government websites appeared to be back up, functioning properly before 10 a.m.
There were additional reports that the outage briefly knocked down United Kingdom government websites.
Akamai later said in a statement that a “software configuration update” triggered the glitch, and that rolling back the update ended the disruption.
“Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai’s platform,” the company wrote.
This story was originally published July 22, 2021 at 10:19 AM.
