A MASS outage took banks, streaming sites and even the PlayStation Network offline for thousands of users – but was not a cyber attack, it has been claimed.
The mystery issue began affecting a wide range of services at around 5pm UK time / noon New York time, with reports of the problem being ironed out coming in shortly before 7pm.
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Website outage – what happened?
Online outage tracker Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports in a matter of minutes on Thursday evening.
And the outage appeared to be affecting users across the UK and USA.
One of the most-complained about outages was PlayStation Network.
That’s the service that let PS4 and PS5 owners play games online.
According to frustrated gamers, they were unable to log in and play with pals.
Gamers had also been struck down by a Steam outage.
That’s one of the world’s most popular gaming stores – and is widely used by PC owners.
A number of UK bank websites were also reported to have gone offline for affected users.
These included HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, TSB, Tesco Bank, and the Bank of Scotland.
It was a similar story in the US, with USBank, American Express, CapitalOne and Chase down.
UK retailers like John Lewis, Argos and Waitrose also appeared to have been affected, while media hub ITV was reportedly take offline too.
And in the US, reports of outages flooded in around Amazon and Costco.
Some users weren’t reporting issues, and said they could access services fine.
It was possible that a back-end service like Amazon Web Services, or a Content Delivery Network (CDN), may have failed.
However, Amazon denied that Web Services was linked to the outage.
Unconfirmed reports suggested the problem may be linked to a performance product offered by Akamai, an American firm, which began investigating issues just after 5pm Thursday.
Akamai’s Edge DNS service is designed to improve loading times and combat attacks, using a network of servers dotted around the world.
The company later tweeted: “We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations.
“We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm this was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform.”
Which websites are down?
Dozens of websites and services were being listed as offline or not working properly.
These included:
- PlayStation Network
- HSBC
- Steam
- Barclays
- Lloyds Bank
- Halifax
- Airbnb
- TSB
- Call of Duty
- Warframe
- Channel 4
- Waitrose
- Sky Bet
- Xero
- EA
- ITV
- British Airways
- Tesco Bank
- LastPass
- Fifa
- Argos
- John Lewis
- UPS
- McDonalds
- Premiere Inn
- Fortnite
- Cloudfare
- 123 Reg
- Credit Karma
- Nvidia
- Bank of Scotland
- Now TV
- Barclaycard
- Amazon Web Services
- Sainsbury’s Bank
- Epic Games Store
- Aldi
- Capital One
- Chase
- Salesforce
- Expedia
- Delta
- AT&T
- HBO Max
- US Bank
- Fedex
There may be more services that haven’t been flagged on Down Detector.
It was also worth noting that some services flagged as offline might not be linked to the wider outage.
We’ve asked PlayStation, Sainsbury’s, Argos, John Lewis and Epic Games, Amazon Web Services and Oracle for comment.
In a statement sent to The Sun, an Amazon spokesperson said: “There are reports of issues related to a Content Delivery Network (Akamai) outside of Amazon’s Network.
“We have investigated AWS services such as Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront and these services are all operating normally at this time.”
A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “We are now up and running and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
The incident follows a similar outage six weeks ago, which took a handful of prominent websites – including gov.uk – offline.
US-based Fastly said the issues experienced on June 8 were down to an “undiscovered software bug” in its system which was triggered by a single unnamed customer who updated their settings.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
