Updated A wide range of internet-connected services in Australia, including banking systems, are experiencing an outage β and it looks like a hiccup at Akamai was at the heart of the problem.
Reports of issues with news sites, gaming services, and β more critically β banking systems began to spread on Australian social media early Thursday afternoon local time. Uptime-tracking service Downdetector concurred, showing a massive spike in issues at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Bankwest, St.
The root cause of the outage is still unknown but fingers soon began pointing to Akamai Technologies, a multinational cloud service company which provides β among other things β a system for defending against Distributed Denial-of-Service DDoS attacks.
Akamai told The Reg this morning: "We are aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible. While fault tracking indicates that services are beginning to return to normal, users still appear to be experiencing difficulties connecting to banking systems.
Can't login online. Come on CBA, I've been trying all afternoon, for the last three hours, to check my account. Akamai confirmed in a statement last night that it had indeed experienced an outage for one of its Prolexic DDoS services, specifically "version 3. The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter. The issue was not caused by a system update or a cyberattack.
