Major banks and airlines in Australia and the United States are among the companies hit by another cut in their online services on Thursday (17), linked to an issue with technology service provider Akamai.
The outage lasted for nearly an hour, during which time users were unable to access the websites or mobile apps of the affected companies.
Airlines affected include the American Delta, American, United and Southwest, as well as the Australian Virgin Australia and the ocean nation’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank.
“We are aware of the problem and are actively working to restore service as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for US supplier Akamai, identified by those concerned as the cause of the cut, told AFP.
The outages were detected at 2:10 p.m. Sydney time (2:10 GMT) and affected the Australian Postal Service, as well as several Australian banks such as Commonwealth, ANZ, Westpac and ME Bank. Everyone has had issues with their mobile apps or online banking products.
Customers of several regional banks reported that their entities’ online services were not working.
Virgin Australia airline said it was “one of many organizations affected by problems with Akamai’s content delivery system.”
Last week, a software bug in US IT service provider Fastly caused problems on the websites of institutions like the White House and the UK government, newspapers like The New York Times, Le Monde and the BBC, as well as from companies like Amazon and Reddit.
Akamai offers a range of products to improve the operation and security of its customers’ websites.
The company did not specify the source of the problem, although one of its affected customers said they used Akamai’s services for “network authentication.”
While there is no evidence that these issues were caused by malicious agents, this event comes at a time when cybersecurity is of concern to many organizations after a series of cyber attacks.
The U.S. colonial pipeline was temporarily closed after an attack in May this year, and JBS was forced to shut down operations in the United States and Australia. The two companies admitted to having paid a ransom to resume their activity.
Brazilian meat industry giant JBS said it was the victim of a large-scale cyberattack. Its unit in the United States said it had suffered extortion because of a cyber attack that forced it to suspend part of its production in North America and Australia. According to the company, the invasion originated in Russia.