For about an hour today, a major website outage knocked out major services in Canada and the U.S. including Amazon, Delta, UPS, Sony’s PlayStation Network, Royal Bank of Canada and Rogers.
Emergency officials from Intel Point Alerts confirmed a U.S. multi-state 911 outage, noting on their Twitter feed that the exact cause of the outage is being investigated. “Virginia is reporting the majority of outages, with at least 4 counties out,” they said.
Content delivery network Akamai’s Edge DNS service suffered a failure just after noon ET, according to Akamai’s status page, causing the outages. It now reports that the issue has been mitigated, although the service is still described as suffering from a partial outage.
This is Akamai’s second major failure in just over a month. In June, a misconfiguration in its Prolexic service took down Australian banks.
Other affected services reported by Intel Point Alerts today include:
- AT&T (911 system)
- U.S. Bank
- Chase Bank
- Discover
- Capital One
- American Express
- Southwest Airlines
Update: this afternoon, Akamai tweeted the following explanation for the outage:
