Sydney (AFP)
The global internet blackout that affected banks and airlines, particularly in Australia and the United States on Thursday, was not caused by a cyberattack, US service provider Akamai said on Friday.
He said in a statement that about 500 of his customers had been deprived of connection to the Internet because of a problem with one of his security products on the network.
The cut affected American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines as well as most of Australia's major banks, depriving their customers of access to their websites and applications.
According to Akamai, the problem was resolved in just over four hours, but most websites were only affected for about an hour.
"The incident was not caused by a system update or by a computer attack," the company said, adding that the origin had been identified as a data routing problem to which it has since been. remedied.
It was linked to a product aimed at preventing denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which consisted in sending massive amounts of data to a server to render it inoperative.
"Most of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored their operations within minutes," Akamai said.
"The vast majority of other clients were rerouted manually shortly thereafter."
This outage is the latest incident to focus attention on the stability of internet platforms vital to the economy and on the key role played by a handful of companies, mostly unknown to the general public, in making the web work. .
Last week, US media and government sites, including those of the White House, New York Times and Amazon, were temporarily affected by an issue at the US company Fastly which offers a service to speed up speed. loading internet pages.
Akamai also offers a variety of products designed to improve internet performance and security.
© 2021 AFP