Several Australian banks and US airlines have reportedly suffered website crashes on Thursday (June 17), after an issue with the web services company Akamai. According to the credible sources, customers have reported problems with banks such as ANZ, St George, Westpac, ME bank, Allianz, Macquarie Bank and the Commonwealth Bank. With this, banking apps were also unavailable.
The airlines that were reportedly affected by the outage include American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines.
Sources have reported that the disruption started at around 14:10 Sydney time (05:10 GMT). Along with the banks and airline companies, Australia Post, the postal service and Virgin Australia, the country's second-largest carrier were also affected.
Commenting on the matter, Virgin Australia tweeted that the company is currently going through a system outage which is impacting its website and Guest Contact Centre.
Meanwhile, Australia Post stated that that some of the company’s services have been impacted by an external outage.
Akamai has reportedly admitted that it was the source of the issue. The company mentioned that it is aware of the problem and is actively working towards the restoration of the services at the earliest.
For the uninitiated, Akamai is one of the world's largest provider of content delivery networks (CDNs), which is known to be a service that helps in speeding up the loading time for websites.
Commonwealth Bank at 16:15 local time tweeted that the services were beginning to restore and thanked the customers for being patient.
On June 8, a similar issue was reported with another CDN provider- Fastly which had caused an hour-long crash at numerous high-profile websites like Reddit, the British government websites and Amazon. The outage had led to chaos as multiple websites operated by e-commerce sites, news outlets, etc. were down.
Source credits: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57508349