Australian website outages pinned to Akamai DDoS service

Cloud delivery and performance vendor Akamai has revealed that a routing table value used by one of its distributed denial of service (DDoS) products was responsible for widespread outages that impacted hundreds of companies yesterday afternoon. 

According to the vendor, the outage occurred for one of its Prolexic DDoS services at 4:20AM UTC yesterday, with impacted customers receiving an error alert within seconds.  

ARN understands that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and ANZ’s Australian operations were among the local companies affected, with both banks reporting outages on social media around this time. 

The service was then restored over four hours later at 8:47AM UTC, with customers initiating the process to route back to the service at that time. 

The vendor claimed that many of the 500 customers affected were automatically rerouted, with operations restored within a few minutes and the large majority of remaining customers manually rerouted shortly after. 

Akamai has also claimed to have taken steps to stop issues like this occurring again, as well as looking to ensure that its customers will be set up for automatic rerouting in the future. 

It also added that the issue was not caused by a system update or cyber attack.