The Amazon website can be viewed in Dandenong, Australia on December 5, 2017. Amazon was among dozens of websites hit by a massive internet outage on Thursday. Quinn Rooney / Getty Images Hide caption
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Quinn Rooney / Getty Images
The Amazon website can be viewed in Dandenong, Australia on December 5, 2017. Amazon was among dozens of websites hit by a massive internet outage on Thursday.
Quinn Rooney / Getty Images
A widespread internet outage caused several large websites to shut down Thursday afternoon, including Amazon, Delta, Capital One, and Costco.
It’s still unclear what caused the outage, but Akamai, a content distribution network that helps spread data across the Internet, posted online that there is an “emerging problem” with its Edge DNS service. A DNS or Domain Name Service helps to match the name of a website with its IP address. When the DNS fails, it is impossible to find and connect to a website by name.
At around 1:13 p.m. ET, the website said “all systems operational”.
When NPR reached him, Akamai said, “We have implemented a solution to this problem and based on recent observations, the service is back to normal.”
Akamai also confirmed that the outage was not caused by a cyber attack.
A similar widespread outage occurred in June when another content delivery network, Fastly, experienced a software bug. Sites like CNN, The New York Times, Twitch, and Reddit were down for almost an hour.
While the outages are temporary, they raise concerns about the number of websites that rely on few content delivery networks like Fastly and Akamai, creating a more fragile internet ecosystem.
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