Consumers were unable access services such as Ally Bank and Fidelity, Sony’s PlayStation Network, Airbnb, or Ally Bank. Many airline websites were also affected, including those of Southwest, British Airways, Delta, and British Airways.
Many sites appear to be functional again after Akamai, a content delivery network that hosts much of the internet, started rolling out a fix to its service. “We continue to monitor the situation, and can confirm that this was not the result of a hacker attack on Akamai platform,” Akamai writes to The Verge.
Many websites attributed the outages to Akamai, making it clear that Akamai was responsible. The New York Metro Transportation Authority (NYMTA) and The Times of India tweeted that Akamai was responsible for their outages. Cloudflare’s CEO has chimed in to say that its service isn’t to blame.
The internet problems also affected gaming services. DownDetector reported a spike of over 40,000 users who were having issues with the PlayStation Network, and the Steam store also had functionality issues. DownDetector also reported problems with Call of Duty and Fortnite. Sony’s PSN status page acknowledged an issue shortly before we published this post: “PlayStation Network services are up and running, but there are external, internet-wide issues that might affect your experience,” the company wrote.
As far as more essential services, a number of banks’ websites also appeared to have been rendered non-functional during the outage, and there were reports of 911 systems being down across multiple states. It is, however, unclear if the emergency services outage was related to the other web outages — the Sheriff’s Department of Grayson County, Virginia, reported that its 911 outage stemmed from a fiber cut, which has now reportedly been fixed.
This outage shows that the web is not decentralized as it is supposed to be. However, major websites are dependent on a few companies for their functionality. One customer had a bug in June that caused Fastly’s CDN to go down. Reddit and Twitch were also affected by the outage.
