Akamai Edge DNS goes down, takes a chunk of the internet with it

If you're wondering why some websites disappeared today

Updated Akamai's Edge DNS service went down on Thursday morning, US West Coast time, knocking over its customers' websites as it fell.

As of 0909 PDT (1609 UTC), the status page of Akamai – which sites around the world rely upon to deliver content among other services – said, "We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service."

A short time later, the biz characterized the incident as a "service disruption":

Akamai is experiencing a service disruption. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an update in 30 minutes.

— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021

An Akamai spokesperson told The Register much the same thing in an email: "Akamai is experiencing a service disruption. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an update in 30 minutes."

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Given the nature of DNS, companies using Akamai's Edge DNS were alerted to the emerging issue when their websites became inaccessible to internet users. Downdetector, a site that tracks service issues, showed a surge in outage reports for dozens of major services that appear to coincide with the reports submitted by Akamai. Affected businesses include: PlayStation Network, Fidelity, Steam, FedEx, AirBnB, Amazon, Google, and many others.

Reports via social media indicated widespread problems around the world. Reports indicated that HSBC bank in the UK and Paytm Money, an investment platform in India, were affected, along with many other firms.

Around 09:47 PDT (16:47 UTC), Akamai said it had made repairs to address the outage.

"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations," the company said. "We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated."

Other network service firms have experienced similar disruptions that also ripple across the globe. Fastly had a significant outage that interfered with much of the internet last month, as did Cloudflare.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince offered a "don't blame us" sympathy tweet, in recognition of the challenges of keeping network infrastructure running smoothly all the time.

Not sure yet why so many sites online not loading, but confirmed it's not a @Cloudflare issue. Bad days happen to everyone so hope whoever is having one it gets resolved quickly. #hugops

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 22, 2021

At the time this story was filed, Akamai's service appeared to be on the mend. ®

Updated to add at 1040 PDT

A spokesperson for Akamai just told us:

We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated and can confirm this was not a result of a cyber attack on the Akamai platform.