Several Indian streaming apps and websites including Zomato, Paytm, Disney+ Hostar and Sony LIV were down on Thursday due to a major global Internet outage. The disruption was caused due to an outage at Internet infrastructure provider Akamai.
This is the second major Internet outage in two months. In June an Internet outage world-wide affected some of the biggest services including Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, CNN and Reddit. The outage was traced to a technical error in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly. CDNs are an important part of the internet infrastructure as they act as proxy servers where companies cache certain data closer to the end-user to offer better services.
The latest outage started around 9 p.m IST. Akamai, a content distribution network, or CDN, which helps data move around the internet, said on its website that it is investigating “an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service.”
This has impacted global companies including Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Capital One, Go Daddy, Vanguard, UPS, LastPass, AT&T and Costco as their websites were loading slowly or showing “DNS failure.”