Online banking and gambling services hit by Internet blackout | the Internet

The websites of HSBC, ITV and Waitrose were among those affected by a widespread blackout that briefly disrupted Thursday afternoon.

Major online banking services, including Barclays, TSB, Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank, have been totally or partially inaccessible for a short time.

Airbnb, PlayStation Network, and Steam also experienced the temporary issue, with some showing users a DNS error.

Unconfirmed reports suggest the issue may be related to a performance product offered by Akamai, a US company, which began investigating the issues just after 5 p.m. UK time.

Its Edge DNS service is designed to improve load times and combat attacks, using a network of servers spread around the world.

Akamai later tweeted, “We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations.

“We continue to monitor the situation and can confirm that this is not a cyber attack on the Akamai platform. “

The incident follows a similar outage six weeks ago, which affected major websites, including gov.uk.

US company Fastly said the problems on June 8 were due to an “undiscovered software bug” in its system, which was triggered by a single anonymous customer who updated their settings.