Multiple Major Websites Down Amid Akamai Outage

[0128672]

Is this affecting iMessages? No one’s replying back to me.

There were several Apple service disruptions today, all of which it states are resolved.

Apple - Support - System Status

Status for all planned and unplanned events for Apple Services.

www.apple.com

 

[nvmls]

This world needs to reset the whole networking system. Shut the internet down and RESET it.

Affected websites:

• PlayStation Network
• HBO
• Fidelity
• UPS
• Steam
• Airbnb
• LastPass
• Discover
• American Express
• Chase
• PNC
• Salesforce
• Mint
• Capital One
• Vanguard
• Delta
• Southwest Airlines
• Newegg
• and more…

Lol Yay, I'd agree but ******* is still up.

 

[nt5672]

never heard of akamai

Been around for 20+ years. They were the first global content distribution service.

 

[DaveP]

When you use your phone or watch as a payment method, I don't believe it needs to have an internet or data connection. The device is the payment card.

Your phone/watch doesn't need Internet, but typically the POS system/terminal does.

 

[zakarhino]

This is why IPFS' principle of a highly decentralized web needs to be a thing.

 

[Shirasaki]

Because you are not in the IT Industry.

Or never checked any short link generated by Microsoft in the early days, or downloaded anything from Microsoft in the early days.

Even today, many Microsoft’s short link starts with aka.ma

 

[opeter]

I just tried and Amazon.de works...

 

[sw1tcher]

One day we will all regret not carrying our wallets. I dont carry mine anymore. It feels nice to not worry about losing it or having it pickpocketed. But one day I’ll regret it lmao.

I always carry my wallet/cash and probably always will because there are street vendors who only accept cash.

 

[Vulkan]

This world needs to reset the whole networking system. Shut the internet down and RESET it.

Affected websites:

• PlayStation Network
• HBO
• Fidelity
• UPS
• Steam
• Airbnb
• LastPass
• Discover
• American Express
• Chase
• PNC
• Salesforce
• Mint
• Capital One
• Vanguard
• Delta
• Southwest Airlines
• Newegg
• and more…

They need to turn it off and turn it on again to see if that fixes it.

 

[york2600]

That does make sense for Apple, but Amazon and AWS? They are the biggest cloud service provider on the planet, it makes zero sense for Amazon to be contacting CDN's from a smaller quasi-competitor.

Amazon retail and AWS operate fairly separately as business units and Amazon retails uses a ton of different vendors to reduce risk and downtime. Paying your competitors so you can get redundancy is nothing new. For instance Apple uses Microsoft Azure heavily and when I worked at Limelight we stored data in Amazon even though we sold an Amazon S3 competitor.

 

[bobtem]

The whole trend of “Hmm, something went wrong… “ is not amusing, coming from the large corporations that should be in control. Stop with the cutesy error messages. Imagine if your pilot said, “gee, something isn’t right, we are working to fix it…”

 

[rpmurray]

They need to turn it off and turn it on again to see if that fixes it.

Maybe do a reinstall of Windows.

 

[rforno]

This may or may not be related, but during the outage (which I didn't know about at the time) which likely affected my Webex session I went into my phone settings to turn off the built-in call screener. My iPhone froze for 10-15 seconds every time I tried to get into its preferences, bounced me back to the home page, and only after a reboot did it clear up. Never saw that happen before.

 

[ghanwani]

We'd never have had the chance to meet Waffles if it wasn't for this outage.

 

[TMRJIJ]

The whole trend of “Hmm, something went wrong… “ is not amusing, coming from the large corporations that should be in control. Stop with the cutesy error messages. Imagine if your pilot said, “gee, something isn’t right, we are working to fix it…”

It’s a good thing ‘most’ of these companies are relying on this CDN to keep their customers alive

 

[1rottenapple]

I thought it was my new work blocking website lol. It was back online when I checked later that day.

 

[MacBH928]

If you look at a cloud provider like Amazon they have regions where they cluster dozens of data centers together to provide services. In the US that would be regions like US-east-1 , US-west-1, or US-west-2 (go Oregon). As a business, you're putting your systems in one or more (hopefully more) of those regions. The problem is those regions aren't right where your customers are. When you stream content on iTunes there's certainly a good amount of API calls that happen there to authorize you, to see what songs are available, to toss ratings data, etc etc and those will come from Apple's systems. There's no need for Apple to actually give you the song though from their Oregon datacenter if you live in say Florida. You want that content to be really close to you to prevent latency and jitter as you stream it. The CDN sources the original content and distributes it to tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of servers globally to get that content super close to you. If you're a Comcast customer every city has Akamai gear and Netflix gear (they run their own CDN) in it. Other CDNs like Cloudflare, Limelight, or Fastly have collections of CDN servers in major metro areas then they peer fiber to the ISPs in those regions. The ISPs love CDNs because it means they don't have to backhaul that traffic over expensive fiber links. Sometimes it comes entirely from their head end. A great example of where something like a CDN really shines is software updates. When I worked at Limelight we distributed a lot of these for gaming consoles and some mobile devices that people here probably use. Say Apple releases iOS 15 tomorrow. They have that in their datacenter, but the various CDNs they use will distribute that around the world and going back to that Florida example 50,000 people in that city will download it from a series of Akamai nodes right in Comcast's equipment room. Never touches the greater Internet which makes it super fast.

So a CDN is just a datacenter that take data from an original server and redistributes it around the world in other data centers!?

As for speeds, the world today is connected via fiber which runs on the speed of light and the speed of light travels the planet 7 times per second at 300,000kmh/186,411mph , so when you say speed I am going to guess you are talking about latency, responsiveness, and to ease the load on the main server by distribution the data over multiple sources?! Any idea if back when the internet ran over telephone wires if it was much slower if data was far over near? I thought it always capped at 56 kbps no matter what

 

[york2600]

so when you say speed I am going to guess you are talking about latency, responsiveness, and to ease the load on the main server by distribution the data over multiple sources?

Yes. A complex website may require 100 different HTTP requests and if you add 100 ms fetching those across the US you're entire web load experience gets pretty awful. When you hit a website that's not using a CDN you feel it instantly. They are painfully slow.