Major Australian Banks, US Airlines Briefly Hit By Internet Outages

The disruption linked to technical issues at Akamai follows an outage at rival Fastly Inc.

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on Thursday, in the second major blackout in just over a week caused by a glitch in an important piece of internet infrastructure. Server-related glitches at content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai had hampered services at Australian banks, while many US airlines, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, also reported an hour-long outage. The disruption linked to technical issues at Akamai follows an outage at rival Fastly Inc that affected a number of popular websites last week. The impacted platform is now up and running, an Akamai spokesperson said, adding that the company was "continuing to validate services."