Due to a massive internet outage today, downdetector.com has issued warnings for popular websites and services, such as PlayStation Network, Steam, Fidelity Investments, Airbnb, FedEx, LastPass, UPS, Amazon and others.
The root cause of the outage appears to be a glitch in Akamai’s Edge DNS service. The system status page reports that Akamai is aware of “an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service” – one downgraded to “Minor Service Outage”, with no further explanation as of the time of writing.
Not sure yet why so many sites online are not loading but confirmed it isn’t @Cloudflare matter. Bad days happen to everyone so hope whoever has one gets sorted out soon. #hugops
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 22, 2021
According to Akamai, a fix has been implemented and Edge DNS is “resuming normal operation”. Akamai also states that the unspecified issue “wasn’t the result of a cyber-attack on the Akamai platform”, though so far there’s no word on what the issue actually was or what caused it.
The number of large-scale internet outages only seems to be increasing, with some of the world’s largest sites often being hit hardest. Today’s outage was the result of a DNS outage rather than a content delivery network failure, but it highlights an important point.
The Internet was originally designed to be decentralized and error-proof, but as the world’s largest sites and services coalesce around a few massive infrastructure providers, outages at those providers are increasingly affecting the Internet ecosystem as a whole.