A wave of brief internet outages has hit the websites and apps of dozens of financial institutions, airlines and other companies across the globe.
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange said in a post on Twitter on Thursday afternoon Hong Kong time that its site was facing technical issues and that it was investigating.
It said in another post 17 minutes later that its websites were back to normal.
We are aware that our websites, including HKEXnews, are experiencing technical difficulties. We are looking into the matter and will update the market in due course.
— HKEX 香港交易所 (@HKEXGroup) June 17, 2021
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Internet monitoring websites including ThousandEyes, Downdetector.com and fing.com showed dozens of disruptions, including to US-based airlines.
Many of the outages were reported by people in Australia trying to do banking, book flights and access postal services.
Australia Post, the country’s postal service, said on Twitter that an “external outage” had impacted a number of its services, and that while most had come back online they are continuing to monitor and investigate.
While most of our services are coming back online, we are continuing to monitor and investigate. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused, and will let you know of any further updates here.
— Australia Post (@auspost) June 17, 2021
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Many services were up and running after an hour or so but the affected companies said they were working to prevent further problems.
Banking services were severely disrupted, with Westpac, the Commonwealth, ANZ and St George all down, along with the website of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Services have mostly been restored.
Virgin Australia said flights were largely operating as scheduled after it restored access to its website and guest contact centre.
“Virgin Australia was one of many organisations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today,” it said. “We are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring.”
Akamai counts some of the world’s biggest companies and banks as customers.
The disruptions came just days after many of the world’s top websites went offline briefly due to a problem with software at Fastly, another major web services company. The company blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting.
Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief. But the outages have underscored how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.
