ISP Column - June 2021

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2021-07-02 07:30:05

On the afternoon June 17 of this year there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia it impacted three of the country’s largest banks, the national postal service, the country’s reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and some US airlines. The roll call of impacted services appeared to reach some 500 services.

The problems were first noticed at around mid-afternoon Australian Eastern Time and were not fully restored until four hours later. The question is of course what do these 500 affected enterprises had in common? Why were they fate-sharing in an outage? This was not the result of a deliberate attack. But it was related to the measures many of the Internet’s enterprises, both large and small, use to deflect the impact of such attacks. The answer is that they were all customers of Akamai and in particular Akamai’s Prolexic DDOS protection system. Akamai’s post-event response was:

"A routing table value used by this particular service was inadvertently exceeded. The effect was an unanticipated disruption of service." https://blogs.akamai.com/2021/06/akamai-provides-prolexic-ddos-service-impact-update-status-resolved.html