Tech provider Akamai blamed for latest global online outages

A global online outage at major banks and airlines on Thursday was caused by a problem with tech provider Akamai, one of the firms affected has confirmed.

Virgin Australia said it "was one of many organisations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system", adding that work was underway to prevent the roughly one-hour blackout from happening again.

"We are aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible", a spokesperson for Akamai said in an emailed statement.

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Many other websites in Australia, including those belonging to the central bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp, and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, had also started to come back online late afternoon on Thursday.

The Reserve Bank of Australia cancelled an operation to buy long-dated government bonds because of technical difficulties.

Websites of major USairlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines, also experienced disruptions early on Thursday, according tooutagemonitoring website Downdetector.

More than a thousand user reports indicated problems at Southwest Airlines, with over 400 user reports indicating the same for Delta Air Lines, according to Downdetector. That number was around 300 for the other two airline companies.

Southwest canceled nearly 300 flights on Wednesday and delayed more than 500 a day after it was forced to temporarily halt operations over a computer glitch.

The websites were back up in about an hour.

Theoutages predominantly in Australia on Thursday come a little over a week after thousands of government, news, and social media websites around the world were hit by a technical issue linked to US-based cloud company Fastly Inc.

(With inputs from agencies)