Web services company Akamai has apologised for a widespread outage that saw many Australian banks disappear from the internet briefly on Thursday, though such availability blips are likely to be the norm as more services become reliant on a small number of cloud giants.
The issue occurred around 2.20pm AEST, and by 3pm many bank customers were taking to Twitter to report that sites and mobile apps were down. This included ANZ, CBA, Westpac, AMP, Macquarie, ME Bank and more. Many were restored by 4pm, though some services didn’t return until almost 7pm.
An internal error at web giant Akamai shut off access to several Australian banks on Thursday.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
Akamai posted a very brief explanation and apology overnight, saying the issue stemmed from a problem with its Prolexic service, which protects customers from a kind of cyber attack called distributed denial of service, or DDoS. A routing error in the service impacted around 500 of Akamai’s customers, ironically resulting in an effect similar to that of a DDoS attack itself; the sites were totally inaccessible.
Akamai said many of the customers were brought back online automatically, while the majority of others were manually rectified shortly thereafter. IT News reported at the time that Akamai was asking some customers to turn off their DDoS protection to fix the issue.
The outage is the second widespread availability issue in as many weeks, with a configuration error at cloud company Fastly resulting in an hour-long interruption at news sites and others last week.
Independent cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said there was no reason to believe the issues were caused by attacks or security breaches, but that such issues in general could be a cause for concern.
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With it being rather trivial for criminals to determine which companies use which services company, and with some businesses using things like firewalls as bandaids to cover insecure platforms, Mr Hunt said the potential is there for widespread outages to be leveraged for attacks.
“It does certainly create an opportunity. And [Akamai] probably would have struggled between ‘do we give guidance to restore availability, at potentially the expense of security?’,” he said.