Bulletins

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

Akamai's network operations control center​

Akamai's network faced issues this morning.

Photo: Akamai

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.

Edge DNS provides DNS resolution services to Akamai's customers, taking on the burden of a critically important step in using the internet. DNS is a bedrock internet system that translates user-friendly web addresses, like protocol.com, into numerical IP addresses that computers use to locate each other across the internet.

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.

Tom Krazit

Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is Protocol's enterprise editor, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.

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