Akamai Technologies, a content delivery company, has apologised after a software update in its services caused several websites to go down.

Sites including Barclays, HSBC, British Airways and Airbnb were affected, but service was restored shortly afterwards.

In its apology, Akamai said: “At 15:46 UTC today, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting availability of some customer websites.

We apologize for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions. (3/3)

“The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations. Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai’s platform.

“We apologise for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions.”

During the outage, a message on the BA website read: “Service Unavailable – DNS failure. The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.”

And a message on Airbnb’s site said: “This site can’t be reached.”

HSBC’s website had a similar message.

There were reports other airlines and major companies are also affected, as well as the 911 service on the east coast of the US.

Edge DNS is a content delivery network (CDN), providing a similar service to Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront or Fastly.

CDNs speed up the internet by keeping copies of websites’ data in various locations around the world, so computers do not have to wait for long periods of time to talk to sites on the other side of the world.

Last month, large parts of the internet went down when CDN Fastly began experiencing issues.

US-based Fastly said the issues on 8 June were down to an “undiscovered software bug” in its system which was triggered by a single unnamed customer who updated their settings.

Related posts:

‘Like a giant firework’: Meteor ‘fireball’ lights up skies over UK WhatsApp introduces video and voice calls on desktop version Whitty and Valance ‘losing sleep over what could go wrong’ as COVID lockdown eases Evolution of ‘twilight zone’ ocean creatures linked to climate change Don’t bank on summer of freedom as scientists predict third COVID wave at height of holiday season Siri appears to leak Apple special event planned for 20 April Human cells grown in monkey embryos triggers ‘Pandora’s box’ ethical concerns AirTags lead the line up of new products at first Apple event of 2021 Arsenal censured by watchdog over crypto token ads Cyber attack on UK’s Defence Academy had ‘significant’ impact Ukraine reveals website attacks were ‘cover for more destructive actions’ Ground-breaking telescope fires boosters to reach final ‘parking spot’ – a million miles from Earth