A failure in the services of the company in the cloud Akamai has caused interruptions in the service of companies like Airbnb, Playstation Network, airlines like Delta Air Lines, distribution chains like Costco Wholesale, financial services like American Express, in addition to numerous banks, or media such as EL PAÍS, among others. This failure in the service has prevented access to the web or that images could be displayed within the news. At the beginning of June, a similar failure in the rival company Fastly put The New York Times, EL PAÍS, Amazon, Twitch, Paypal or Reddit out of play.
The company explained that the drop was due to a failure in DNS services, as admitted by Akamai. Each web page has an IP (internet protocol in English) address, which is the equivalent of a telephone number. It is presented as a string of four or six numbers separated by periods, such as 192.158.1.38. The IP addresses have to be translated into names of pages that we can remember, such as elpais.com. This is done by the Domain Name System, known by its acronym DNS.
The so-called cloud is made up of many computers connected online that host a good part of the services that we access without being on our device.
Examples are emails, storages like Dropbox or home devices like Alexa.
This market is dominated by Amazon with its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), followed by Microsoft and Google.
These computers may be located on the other side of the world.
Therefore, there can be delays in the delivery of online content.
That is why there is a second level formed by other firms called content distribution network
(CDN) A CDN is basically a network of servers in different data centers around the world that are dedicated to temporarily storing copies of your clients' pages.
The idea is to avoid that the geographical remoteness of a service or its central servers, or a high demand from users, can cause a page to take time to load or even cause the system to crash.
One of them, Fastly, rose to fame after its fall in early June after suffering a similar fall.
The other two best known are Akamai and Cloudflare.
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