Security News > 2021 > June > Hiccup in Akamai’s DDoS Mitigation Service Triggers Massive String of Outages
Major financial institutions, airlines and the Hong Kong stock exchange were knocked offline by a backfiring distributed denial-of-service mitigation service Thursday.
The hour-long outage, which was triggered at approximately 1 a.m. EST Thursday, is tied to Akamai Technology's anti-DDoS Prolexic service.
"Virgin Australia was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today and we are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring," the airline said in a statement.
Akamai is aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible.
Advice by Akamai posted to social media advised, "If you face the downtime, kindly turn off/route off Prolexic solution." Early, in a tweet posted at 6:24 a.m. EST on Thursday, Akamai stated; "Akamai is aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible."
According to Akamai's description, Prolexic is a DDoS mitigation service that can fend off "Terabit-scale attacks".