Nationwide internet outages impact major companies

 

GOSHEN, Ind -- A nationwide internet outage caused leading consumer based companies to be unavailable for almost an hour due to a failed security update.

The outage took place just after noon on Thursday, after a failed update from a industry leading company by the name of Akamai, attempted to send an updated domain name system (DNS) security patch to its customers.

Companies such as Akamai are responsible for protecting sites for companies like FedEx and Amazon from all incoming and outgoing web traffic.

"They provide a DNS filtering service for a lot of their big clients. So, like an AIRBNB, a FedEx, a McDonalds that kind of thing. And what DNS does is it basically puts an umbrella of protection around the web traffic, both in and out of big websites," said Mapletronics VP of marketing and sales Adam Herschberger.

When companies such as Akamai and Oracle are in charge of protecting the sites for companies, they're liable when sites are down for any amount of time, regardless of the reason.

"At the end of the day any kind of disruption is something we want to avoid. We look at it in terms of our client base in two fronts. We want to make sure we’re keeping our clients stable and secure," said Herschberger.

Unfortunately for Akamai the stability was not part of their accomplishments Thursday.

On the other hand, security was, since none of the companies affected, had any breaching take place.

Moving forward, consumers have nothing to worry about when visiting the companies who were briefly down today.

Experts such as Mapletronics say for anyone who is worried about security breaches, the best practice is to change passwords monthly.