Akamai outage was caused by an issue with its Prolexic DDoS protection service

An outage suffered by CDN, cybersecurity and cloud services provider Akamai was caused by an issue with its Prolexic DDoS attack protection service.

CDN, cybersecurity and cloud services provider Akamai revealed that the recent outage suffered by the company was caused by a problem with its Prolexic DDoS attack protection service.

The Prolexic Routed DDoS protection is a fully managed DDoS scrubbing service. Akamai reported that customers using the version 3.0 of the service were impacted and they were immediatelly notified of the problem.

The issue caused the unavailability of the websites of many customers of the company, including prominent companies in multiple industries worldwide such as U.S. airlines, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

“Many of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored operations within a few minutes. The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter.” reads the statement published by the security firm. “The issue was not caused by a system update or a cyberattack. A routing table value used by this particular service was inadvertently exceeded. The effect was an unanticipated disruption of service.”

The outage lasted around 4 hours, from 4:20 AM UTC to 8:47 AM UTC.

The company recognized the impact of this issue and apologized to its customers, it also announced to have taken additional steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Recently a similar incident made the headlines, a large number of popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, PayPal, GitHub, gov.uk, CNN, and the BBC faced problems due to a software glitch at Fastly CDN provider.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Akamai)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.