Online banking and entertainment sites hit by outage
22 July 2021, 18:34
Websites of many UK online banking services, as well as ITV, Waitrose, Airbnb, and the PlayStation Network among those affected.
The websites of HSBC, ITV and Waitrose were among a widespread outage which briefly caused disruption on Thursday afternoon.
Major online banking services – including Barclays, TSB, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank – were either entirely or partially inaccessible for a short period.
Airbnb, the PlayStation Network and Steam also experienced the temporary glitch, with some showing users a DNS error.
Unconfirmed reports suggest the problem may be linked to a performance product offered by Akamai, an American firm which began investigating issues just after 5pm UK time.
We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm this was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform.
— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021
Its Edge DNS service is designed to improve loading times and combat attacks, using a network of servers dotted around the world.
Later, Akamai 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.”
We know there are issues affecting the digital services of a number of companies, including our own. This means you may not be able to log on to Internet banking at the moment. We're sorry about this. We’ll update you as soon as we know more.
— Bank of Scotland (@BankofScotland) July 22, 2021
The incident follows a similar outage six weeks ago, which impacted 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.
