Websites of some state government agencies and some businesses were offline for a time Thursday due to a widespread Internet outage.
The Sacramento Bee reported Thursday afternoon that Akamai, which provides data resources for many websites, said in updates to Twitter and its website shortly after 9 a.m. that it was investigating an “emerging issue” with its domain name system service, called Edge DNS.
A number of major companies use Edge DNS for their websites, including Amazon, AT&T, Delta Air Lines, UPS and Capital One, all of which were reportedly down or running slowly earlier in the morning. As of 10 a.m., those businesses’ websites appeared to be back up and running.
More than half a dozen state government websites were briefly knocked offline, the Bee reported.
“Akamai’s outage impacted CAL FIRE and seven other state government websites,” California Department of Technology spokeswoman Amy Norris said in an emailed statement to the Bee. “The state of California chooses vendor-managed services that have backups and redundancy built into their service offerings. This architecture is why Akamai was able to recover quickly and minimize impact to their nationwide customer base, including the state’s websites.”
Akamai attributed the glitch to a software configuration update, and it said that rolling back the update ended the disruption.
“Akamai can confirm this was not a cyber attack against Akamai’s platform,” the company wrote.
