Airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms suffered brief website outages early Thursday after a key piece of internet infrastructure failed, sparking the second major interruption of the past 10 days.
Virgin Australia said in a statement on Thursday that it had resolved an IT outage caused by a failure at Akamai Technologies, a global content delivery network.
“Virgin Australia was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today and we are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring,” the airline said in a statement.
The outages on Thursday ensnared companies including Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Bank and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange website was also briefly offline.
Remember: The outages come just over a week after countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour when Fastly, another major content delivery network, suffered a widespread failure.
Content delivery systems improve load times for websites by storing content, and other aspects of websites and apps, on servers that are physically closer to users.
Investor insight: The outage also affected the sites of Vanguard and E*TRADE, according to monitor Downdetector — an important reminder that global markets remain vulnerable to tech turbulence.
