You had one job: Akamai's Prolexic Denial-of-Service protection system fingered after users in Australia denied, er, services
A wide range of internet-connected services in Australia, including banking systems, are experiencing an outage – and it looks like a hiccup at Akamai was at the heart of the problem.
Reports of issues with news sites, gaming services, and – more critically – banking systems began to spread on Australian social media early Thursday afternoon local time. Uptime-tracking service Downdetector concurred, showing a massive spike in issues at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Bankwest, St.George Bank, Bank Australia, Bank of Melbourne, and others.
"We're aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we're urgently investigating," Commonwealth Bank told customers. "We apologise and thanks for your patience, we’ll provide an update soon."
The root cause of the outage is still unknown but fingers soon began pointing to Akamai Technologies, a multinational cloud service company which provides – among other things – a system for defending against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
