A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, and appears to be affecting 911 services in several areas.
Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of outages shortly before 12 pm EST on Thursday.
Among the affected websites were US Bank, UPS, Fox News, American Airlines, AT&T, and Expedia.
You’re up. Who cares about banking?
Allegedly not. The update is that Akamai put the blame on a routine update of its software, which resolved itself when they rolled it back.
Allegedly, Steve, is the magic word.
Who does a routine update in the middle of the day?
Given Akamai servers are globally located (in 135 countries at last count), there isn’t really a down time during which they can do updates.
How many countries have an Amazon? A UPS?
And if this routine, how come this hasn’t happened before?
Unless you’re talking about AWS, Amazon and UPS operate on local time. Akamai’s servers all have to by updated at the same time for their system to work, whether they’re in Massachusetts, Germany, or Japan.
Not every computer company has as many incompetent programmers as Microsoft. Oh, and in June, one of Akamai’s competitors had a similar situation, which was blamed on a customer doing something unexpected exposing an unknown flaw.
And again, Steve, if this was routine maintenance, why haven’t we heard about outages before.
You might be completely right, but why did these companies go down now and not before. And if this is a monthly, or other time frame situation, do you think these big companies would tolerate going off line for an hour or so at a certain time of the calendar year?
Mar, the systems these outfits use become more and more complex with each “upgrade”, and that’s if they don’t even plug in a few “enhancements” between upgrades. Some programmer-team missed something during system-test, and it popped up after then installed the upgrade.
Actually, it happens all the time, but now, instead of affecting ONLY your Bank, who has its own systems, it affects lots of businesses because this is a ‘super-system’ which lots of businesses use.
Thanks Dad. I am not actually computer litterate. My first experience of computers was in college with a Tandy (Radio Shack) computer, with a dot matrix printer with a dial up modem.
Anything beyond that is beyond me.