Akamai fixes Edge DNS service after a major outage downs several sites

Akamai confirmed that an issue with its Edge DNS service was responsible for taking out dozens of prominent web sites for about an hour Thursday, and said a fix is currently rolling out to customers.

There's a long-running joke in web operations circles that whenever there's any kind of major internet outage, "it's always DNS" to blame, usually as the result of a manual configuration error. Akamai's cloud services theoretically make it easier for companies to manage this crucial function, but the outage caused several major sites to go offline for about an hour Thursday morning before starting to recover.

Akamai's issue comes a little over a month after a similar outage hit Fastly, one of its major competitors. In both cases, the companies restored services relatively quickly by the standards of major web-scale operations.