“We are monitoring a global issue related to a partner Edge DNS that is impacting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties,” Oracle said. Akamai and Oracle are two key providers of internet infrastructure services. Akamai’s Edge DNS supports the internet by helping route web browsers to their correct destinations, as well as providing some security. For more information read our article, What is a DNS Server.
How the Internet Outage was Addressed
At around 12:50 pm ET, which was less than an hour after the outages began, Akamai released the following statement: “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.” Later on Thursday, Akamai released an explanation for the outage, stating it was caused by a “software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system.”
Not the First Internet Outage in Recent Months
The second outage occurred just ten days later due to a bug in Akamai’s service that supports the mitigation of the distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). A DDoS attack is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator tries to make a website (or connected device) unavailable for its intended use by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting its service. This is typically accomplished by flooding the website or targeted machine with excess requests with the goal of overloading the system and preventing legitimate requests or access. Those affected by this outage included airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms.
The Rise in Internet Outages
With the rise in large-scale Internet outages, many impacting some of the world’s largest sites, it makes us ask, what is the root cause? Thursday’s outage was a result of a DNS failure rather than a content delivery network failure or cyber-attack. This points to an important fact. The internet is becoming less decentralized than originally designed to be. As the world’s largest companies and organizations rely on just a few massive infrastructure providers, outages due to system failures at those providers are increasingly more likely. Moreover, those outages are more likely to have significant effects on the internet as a whole.
