Airlines, banks, stock exchanges, and trading platforms all experienced brief website outages early Thursday after a critical piece of internet infrastructure failed, the second major outage in less than ten days.
Virgin Australia announced on Thursday that an IT outage caused by a failure at Akamai Technologies (AKAM), a global content delivery network, had been resolved.
“Virgin Australia was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today and we are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring,” the airline said in a statement.
Southwest Airlines (LUV), United Airlines (UAL), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBAUF), Westpac Bank (WBK), and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANEWF) were among the companies affected by the outages on Thursday (ANZ). The website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was also briefly unavailable.
Akamai admitted that it was experiencing a problem.
In a statement, the tech firm said, “We are aware of the issue and are actively working to restore services as soon as possible.”
The outages come just over a week after another major content delivery network, Fastly (FSLY), went down for about an hour, taking down countless websites and apps around the world.
Content delivery systems reduce website load times and provide additional services to websites, apps, and platforms. The services achieve this by storing content and features of websites and apps on servers located closer to users.
Southwest Airlines said in a statement to CNN Business that it worked quickly to restore the systems after the outage. The airline said in a statement that the connectivity outage had no effect on its flight operations.
United Airlines told one Twitter user, “We are experiencing technical issues and working promptly to fix them. We will update you once this matter is resolved.”
A spokesperson for Los Angeles International Airport told CNN Business that there were some minor delays but no significant cancellations or delays. A request for comment from the airport about which websites or systems were affected was not immediately returned.
Customers at Australia’s Westpac bank have been apologized to. “Affected Westpac systems are now back up and running following an issue today with a third party provider which impacted some of our services including internet banking,” it said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Commonwealth Bank of Australia said “we are seeing services return following a tech outage which had widespread impacts across businesses.” The outage impacted ANZ’s app and internet banking platform, but the company said services had been restored.
According to Downdetector, a website outage monitoring service, the websites of Vanguard, Automatic Data Processing, Frontier Airlines, and E-trade were also briefly unavailable.
Major website and app outages occur from time to time and usually don’t last long — internet service providers, content delivery networks, and other hosting services are designed with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers to minimize disruptions when things go wrong.
