What is Akamai and why a failure in its systems caused the internet to go down

07/22/2021 20:01

• Clarín.com

• Technology

Updated 07/22/2021 20:01

Akamai

, one of the most popular cloud service providers, had its black Thursday with a glitch that "turned off half the internet" for an hour.

Services that suffered from accessibility issues include

PlayStation Network, Airbnb, Steam, and HBO Max

.

The impact of the drop not only wreaked havoc on major

streaming services, airlines and even online gaming platforms

, but on media and banking sites around the world.

In Argentina, for example, the La Nación and Infobae sites remained inaccessible for more than half an hour.

In Spain the same happened with

the newspaper El País

and the homebanking of 

Bankia, Santander

and the telephone company Vodafone.

They even reported glitches on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter as well.

Specifically, people who tried to access these pages

encountered errors in DNS

or the Domain Name System, a system that associates information with the domain name.

The Domain Name System is likened to a phone book of web pages, since it is a technology that establishes the IP address that must be used when people try to access specific web pages.

The importance of Akamai on the internet

Akamai Technologies

is a global content

delivery network

(

Content Delivery Network

),

cybersecurity and cloud services company

that since 1998 has provided Internet and web security services worldwide.

The technology company operates a

network of servers around the world

and rents capacity on these servers to clients or companies who want their websites to run faster.

This makes it possible by

distributing content from locations close to the user

, thus the downloads of certain content (videos, images, music, documents, websites, etc.) are more reliable and faster.

This improvement in efficiency is achieved with a better balancing of the load to which both the servers that host the content and the links that interconnect the different sections of the network are subjected,

eliminating possible bottlenecks

and serving the data based on the geographical proximity of the end user.

As for this global drop,

Akamai did not make the origin of the ruling official.

 He only briefly reported and through his account on the social network Twitter that it was a "service disruption."

Akamai is experiencing a service disruption.

We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an update in 30 minutes.

- Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021

After half an hour of waiting, they reported that the problem with the DNS was normalized and that they were resuming their operations.

"We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact was completely eliminated," they added.

It is the second time in two months that there has been a generalized outage of this kind.

In June, a server failure at US

cloud

computing services

provider

Flatsy

brought down several websites around the world, including media outlets such as

The New York Times, The Guardian and CNN

.

Fastly's antecedent

There are more and more important intermediaries supporting the operation of the internet.

Photo: AFP

During the first week of June, dozens of digital service, social media and media websites around the world were down for more than an hour.

The incident was much commented because it affected giants such as

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitch

and the main players in the tech market.

The outage had lasted just over an hour, until they had to announce that they had identified "a service configuration that caused disruptions to our POPs globally and we have disabled that configuration, our global network is back online."

Fastly is an American provider of cloud computing services

, a technology giant that provides a CDN or content delivery network.

SL

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