News: 1623921311

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You had one job: Akamai's Prolexic Denial-of-Service protection system fingered after users in Australia denied, er, services

(2021/06/17)


A wide range of internet-connected services in Australia, including banking systems, are experiencing an outage – and it looks like a hiccup at Akamai was at the heart of the problem.

Reports of issues with news sites, gaming services, and – more critically – banking systems began to spread on Australian social media early Thursday afternoon local time. Uptime-tracking service [1]Downdetector concurred, showing a massive spike in issues at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Bankwest, St.George Bank, Bank Australia, Bank of Melbourne, and others.

"We're aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we're urgently investigating," Commonwealth Bank told customers. "We apologise and thanks for your patience, we’ll provide an update soon."

[2]

The root cause of the outage is still unknown but fingers soon began pointing to Akamai Technologies, a multinational cloud service company which provides – among other things – a system for defending against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

[3]

Akamai told The Reg this morning: "We are aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible."

[4]Cloudflare network outage disrupts Discord, Shopify

[5]AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn't fix for hours due to 'environmental conditions' on data centre floor

[6]Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

[7]IBM Cloud resets 'Days Since Last Major Incident' clock to zero – after just five days

Its defence system, dubbed Prolexic, may be to blame: local Aussie outlet [8]ITnews has posted a support chat session in which an Akamai agent advised a customer to "kindly turn off/route off [the] Prolexic solution" in order to resolve the issue.

While fault tracking indicates that services are beginning to return to normal, users still appear to be experiencing difficulties connecting to banking systems. "I've been stuck at Coles for two hours now," one bank user complained. "Could I get a Zinger Stacker Box coupon for the wait? Cheers."

"Services are still down," said another, a full hour after Commonwealth Bank had stated it was "starting to see services return to normal". "Can't use the app. Can't login online. Come on CBA, I've been trying all afternoon, for the last three hours, to check my account." ®

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[1] https://downdetector.com.au/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YMsdPT3jrpBObp1s-z5cVgAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YMsdPT3jrpBObp1s-z5cVgAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/cloudflare_outage_captcha/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/aws_eu_central_1_incident/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/09/fastly_explains_web_blackout/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/26/ibm_cloud_multiple_outages/

[8] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/major-banks-online-services-eftpos-airline-systems-go-down-566080

[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/

Regrettably, your website is scheduled for demolition

Precordial thump

Prolexic Vogon Jeltz up to his old tricks.

The Minnesota Board of Education voted to consider requiring all
students to do some "volunteer work" as a prerequisite to high school
graduation.
Senator Orrin Hatch said that "capital punishment is our society's
recognition of the sanctity of human life."
According to the tax bill signed by President Reagan on December 22,
1987, Don Tyson and his sister-in-law Barbara run a "family farm." Their
"farm" has 25,000 employees and grosses $1.7 billion a year. But as a "family
farm" they get tax breaks that save them $135 million a year.
Scott L. Pickard, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of
Public Works, calls them "ground-mounted confirmatory route markers." You
probably call them road signs, but then you don't work in a government agency.
It's not "elderly" or "senior citizens" anymore. Now it's "chrono-
logically experienced citizens."
According to the FAA, the propeller blade didn't break off, it was
just a case of "uncontained blade liberation."
-- Quarterly Review of Doublespeak (NCTE)