Major banks, airlines in Australia, U.S. report online outages
Major banks and airlines in Australia and america suffered brief online outages Thursday, with several blaming an "external provider" for the disruption.
Most of Australia's major financial businesses reported customers cannot access websites and mobile apps, while website Downdetector said a slew of U.S. airlines were also affected.
American, Delta, United and Southwest airlines were included in this, although all four websites appeared to be working shortly after.
The issues were more prolonged in Australia -- where problems hit in the mid-afternoon as a lot of the rest of the world slept -- with services only slowly returning one hour after the first reports.
A spokesperson for ANZ bank told AFP that the incident was "linked to an external provider" but that "connectivity was restored quickly and the most impacted services are back online".
Australia's largest financial firm Commonwealth Bank told AFP that it and many of the country's major banks had been affected.
Westpac and ME Bank also reported issues with their mobile applications or online banking products, while customers for St. George and several regional banks reported these were down too.
The outages commenced around 2:10 p.m. Sydney time and didn't appear to be limited to the banking sector.
Airline Virgin Australia posted to Twitter: "We are experiencing something outage which is impacting our website and Guest Contact Centre."
Australia Post, the country's postal service, said some services were hit by an "external outage".
Earlier this month major US media and government websites, like the White House, New York Times, Reddit and Amazon were temporarily down after a glitch with cloud computing services provider Fastly.
The company offers a service to websites all over the world to increase loading time for websites.
A series of high profile hack-for-ransom attacks also have left corporations all over the world jittery over cybersecurity risks, although there was no indication the most recent problems were caused by malicious actors.
Colonial Pipeline was briefly shuttered after an attack in May, and JBS, the world's major meat producer, was forced to stop operations in the usa and Australia.
Both firms reportedly paid ransom to get procedures back up and running.
The issue of cybersecurity was at the top of the agenda when US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin met in Geneva this week.
Washington believes hackers who've extorted vast sums of dollars from Western governments, companies, and organisations operate from Russian soil.
Source: japantoday.com
