23. July 2021

This article has been indexed from E Hacking News – Latest Hacker News and IT Security News

Several major websites faced outages on Thursday due to a glitch in Akamai Technologies Inc’s (AKAM.O) systems, the second widespread outage linked to the cloud company in two months. Affected websites included DraftKings, Airbnb, FedEx, Delta, Barclays, and the PlayStation network used for online games. 

“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” Akamai tweeted. 

The disruption was caused by a vulnerability in the domain name system (DNS) service, designed to keep websites, apps, and services running smoothly and securely, that was triggered during a software update and lasted up to an hour.

DNS services play a vital role in the functioning of the internet, but are known to have bugs and can be easily exploited by threat actors. Companies like Akamai have designed their own DNS services that are meant to solve some of these problems for their users. But when things go south or there’s an outage, it can cause a knock-on effect to all of the customer websites and services that rely on it.