Akamai outage was caused by an issue with its Prolexic DDoS protection service

An outage suffered by CDN, cybersecurity and cloud services provider Akamai was caused by an issue with its Prolexic DDoS attack protection service.

CDN, cybersecurity and cloud services provider Akamai revealed that the recent outage suffered by the company was caused by a problem with its Prolexic DDoS attack protection service.

The Prolexic Routed DDoS protection is a fully managed DDoS scrubbing service. Akamai reported that customers using the version 3.0 of the service were impacted and they were immediatelly notified of the problem.

The issue caused the unavailability of the websites of many customers of the company, including prominent companies in multiple industries worldwide such as U.S. airlines, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

“Many of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored operations within a few minutes. The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter.” reads the statement published by the security firm. “The issue was not caused by a system update or a cyberattack. A routing table value used by this particular service was inadvertently exceeded. The effect was an unanticipated disruption of service.”

The outage lasted around 4 hours, from 4:20 AM UTC to 8:47 AM UTC.

The company recognized the impact of this issue and apologized to its customers, it also announced to have taken additional steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Recently a similar incident made the headlines, a large number of popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, PayPal, GitHub, gov.uk, CNN, and the BBC faced problems due to a software glitch at Fastly CDN provider.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Akamai)