These outages were also reported by Oracle (ORCL), two of the key providers of internet infrastructure services, as well as Akamai (AKAM), and Oracle (ORCL).
Oracle announced Thursday afternoon that Akamai's disruption caused its outage.
Oracle stated that it is monitoring an issue global to a partner Edge DNS which is affecting access to many internet resources including Oracle cloud properties.
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Akamai's Edge DNS service routes web browsers to the correct destination and provides security services.
Akamai stated that the service was resuming normal operations at 12:50 ET, less than an hour after outages started. We will monitor the situation to make sure that any adverse effects are fully minimized.
Later Thursday afternoon, Akamai explained that the outage was caused by a "software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system." It was confirmed that the disruption occurred for up to an hour and was not caused by a cyberattack.
Fidelity, the US Securities and Exchange Commission document search site, Airbnb and British Airways were among the websites that were affected. The majority of affected sites were restored within an hour.
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This is Akamai's third major internet outage within two months. In early June, dozens of websites including Target, the New York Times and a UK government website went down for around 50 minutes because of a widespread failure at content delivery network Fastly. Ten days later, airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms suffered brief outages, which Akamai said was the result of a bug in a service that helps mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Sometimes, major website or app outages occur but they rarely last for long. Multiple redundancies are used in internet service providers, content delivery networks, and other hosting services to minimize disruptions when things go wrong. However, the recent outages have caused some experts to warn of the risks of the internet's reliance on a relatively small number of core infrastructure providers.
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