Australia Suffers Widespread Internet Outage

Australians’ lives were disrupted on Thursday by a widespread internet outage that impacted the country’s mail service and multiple businesses, including banks and airlines.

The outage began in the early hours and was caused by a problem at Akamai Technologies, a global content delivery network (CDN) and cybersecurity and cloud service provider. 

Akamai, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has acknowledged the issue, but has not yet disclosed the cause of service disruptions to its hosting platform, which mitigates against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. 

Akamai’s Chris Nicholson told NPR: “Akamai can confirm the segment of our Prolexic platform impacted is up and running and we are continuing to validate services. We will share more details of what transpired, but our first priority is ensuring all customer impact is mitigated.”

Three of the country’s four largest banks – ANZ, Westpac, and the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) – were all affected along with many smaller banks and some credit unions.

On Thursday afternoon, banking customers began reporting on social media that they were experiencing access issues when trying to use online banking services and banking apps.

Banks used social media to let their customers know that they were trying to deal with the situation.

CBA tweeted: “We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating.”

The Reserve Bank of Australia said on Thursday night: “We have implemented appropriate mitigations and the website is now back up and running.” 

However, ABC News reported that ongoing technical problems led to the cancellation of some market operations between the Reserve Bank and other commercial banks. 

Services were also disrupted at Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Australia, which stated on social media that it was being impacted by a system outage that had affected its website and contact center.

Virgin, whose services were back online shortly after 5pm, stated that it “was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today and we are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring.”

The national mail service, Australia Post, said that a number of its services had been knocked offline by an “external outage.” The Hong Kong Stock Exchange‘s website was also impacted.

Australians’ lives were disrupted on Thursday by a widespread internet outage that impacted the country’s mail service and multiple businesses including banks and airlines.

The outage began in the early hours and was caused by a problem at Akamai Technologies, a global content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity and cloud service provider. 

Akamai, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has acknowledged the issue, but has not yet disclosed the cause of service disruptions to its hosting platform, which mitigates against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. 

Akamai’s Chris Nicholson told NPR: “Akamai can confirm the segment of our Prolexic platform impacted is up and running and we are continuing to validate services. We will share more details of what transpired, but our first priority is ensuring all customer impact is mitigated.”

Three of the country’s four largest banks – ANZ, Westpac, and the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) – were all affected along with many smaller banks and some credit unions.

On Thursday afternoon, banking customers began reporting on social media that they were experiencing access issues when trying to use online banking services and banking apps.

Banks used social media to let their customers know that they were trying to deal with the situation.

CBA tweeted: “We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating.”

The Reserve Bank of Australia said on Thursday night: “We have implemented appropriate mitigations and the website is now back up and running.” 

However, ABC News reported that ongoing technical problems led to the cancellation of some market operations between the Reserve Bank and other commercial banks. 

Services were also disrupted at Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and at Virgin Australia, which stated on social media that it was being impacted by a system outage that had affected its website and contact center.

Virgin, whose services were back online shortly after 5pm, stated that it “was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today and we are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring”.

The national mail service Australia Post said that a number of its services had been knocked offline by an “external outage”. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange‘s website was also impacted.