Several websites including Paytm, Airbnb go down in the Edge DNS glitch

Yesterday night, a glitch in the Akamai’s Edge DNS took a major chunk of websites down with it. Popular websites including Paytm, Zomato, Airbnb, HBO were also affected by the issue. A message of “Service Unavailable- DNS failure” was been displayed to the users trying to access those sites. As per the DownDetector website, the glitch appeared to arise at around 9 pm(IST) on Thursday night and the Edge DNS issue was fixed by Akamai Technologies at 10:20 pm on the same night. Several news portals were also affected by this glitch.

Akamai Technologies, the company whose product Edge DNS faced an issue confirmed that the outage was not caused due to a cyber-attack. The number of internet services disruptions tells us that the level of traffic being handled by Akamai Technologies. Last month, Fastly CDN, a company working in a similar field as Akamai had also faced a similar issue which made websites like Twitter, Reddit goes down. Internet disruptions have become common since the pandemic had begun last year, primarily due to the increased internet traffic.

 What is DNS?

DNS or Domain Name System is like the directory of the internet, it translates whatever we search to IP addresses so that the web browsers can locate and load the servers/ resources/ pages we have demanded. Each device connecting to the internet has a unique address called an IP address, the DNS services eliminate the need for users to learn IP addresses to find the desired internet devices.

A few hours ago, Akamai said it fix for the issue it was having with its Edge DNS service. Many of the websites that were affected by the outage are starting to come back online, including PSN. Downdetector is also tracking fewer outage reports.

Later they wrote on Twitter – “We have implemented a fix for this issue and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated.”

Again they wrote, “Akamai is experiencing a service disruption. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an update in 30 minutes”.

Also Read- The New Guidelines: An Overview