Today the Internet has been plunged into a new chaos. At around 5:55 PM , thousands of web pages have stopped working . The ruling is reminiscent of a similar one that we have suffered in recent months after the chaotic Fastly ruling. Now, the failure seems to be related to a DNS server, as most websites show the error ” Service Unavailable – DNS failure “.
The ruling is affecting thousands of websites on the Internet. Among them are Airbnb, Steam, PlayStation Network, UPS, LastPass, El País, ING Direct or BBVA . None of those web pages work correctly, where upon entering a message appears saying Service Unavailable – DNS failure . The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.
The webs do not work and show a DNS failure
At the moment we do not know the origin of the failure, but the websites do not make any attempt to respond, giving this failure as an error when it comes to finding the DNS. The bug has spread globally, so it doesn’t seem like a bug located in a specific server area, but something that is affecting everyone.
These types of falls are usually the culprit of an erroneous update that has been launched without being thoroughly tested, or a technical failure in a switchboard. Most likely, it is a software glitch like what happened with Fastly.
The failure is Akamai’s fault
In this case, the failure appears to be Akamai’s fault. The company has confirmed that it is experiencing an Edge DNS failure, and that they are currently investigating it. The confirmation of the failure has occurred at 18:09, so it is likely that it will take even more than an hour to fix it, in which the affected websites will not work correctly.
Akamai is a CDN company similar to Cloudflare that is responsible for distributing content over the Internet. As a result, the load is distributed closer to the destination areas, and the load on the servers from which the original information starts is reduced. In this case, the company offers Edge DNS services, which are responsible for offering protection against DDoS attacks .
7:30 PM Update: Akamai has confirmed that it has fixed the bug at 7:09 PM , and everything is back to normal.
