Global outage: why do websites keep going down?

This is happening so often now it’s become a trend – a number of popular websites around the world were taken offline just hours ago after a major outage

Affected sites include Airbnb, UPS, HSBC, British Airways and Playstation – with visitors to the sites being greeted with a “DNS error message”.

Although some pages in Europe and the US seemed to be accessible again, others in the Asia-Pacific region remained offline for a longer period.

DNS service provider, Akamai has taken responsibility for the issue and tweeted that “the service is now resuming normal operations”.

This is the second outage of its kind in two months – with consumers questioning whether similar issues will become more and more prevalent.

Are we seeing outages more often?

In June, we saw internet service provider Fastly go down, taking a large number of popular websites offline.

The websites who went offline included Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times.

Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

Issues are popping up more frequently when it comes to outages, so is it of concern to users?

The outages, while temporary, are raising concerns about the number of websites that rely on just a few content delivery networks like Fastly and Akamai, creating a more fragile internet ecosystem.