The recent global blackout “was not caused” by a cyberattack



Illustration of a person browsing the Internet. – fancycrave1

No malicious intent… The global Internet blackout that affected banks and airlines around the world on Thursday was not caused by a cyberattack, US service provider Akamai said on Friday.

The cut affected airlines American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines as well as most of Australia’s major banks, depriving their customers of access to their websites and applications.

A data routing problem

The American service provider said in a statement that about 500 of its customers had been deprived of Internet connection because of a problem with one of its security products on the network. According to Akamai, the issue was resolved in just over four hours, but most websites were only affected for about an hour.

“The incident was not caused by a system update or by a computer attack,” the company said, adding that the origin had been identified as a data routing problem which it has since had. been remedied. It was linked to a product aimed at preventing denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which consisted in sending massive amounts of data to a server to render it inoperative.

Internet failures on the increase

The outage is the latest incident to focus attention on the stability of economy-critical internet platforms and the key role played by a handful of companies, mostly unknown to the general public, in making the web work. .

Last week, US media and government sites, including those of the White House, the New York Times and Amazon, were temporarily affected by a problem at the American company Fastly, which offers a service to speed up the loading speed of Internet pages.



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