A major website outage on Thursday affected web pages for some of the world's biggest companies.
The website Downdetector showed sites belonging to retailers, banks, airlines and gaming services across the UK, US and other countries were knocked offline.
Around 30,000 companies including Amazon, McDonald's, Airbnb and PlayStation were among those that suffered the outage for about 40 minutes before coming online again.
Many of those affected took to social media sites to apologise and reassure customers.
Airbnb said it was investigating the cause of the incident in a post on Twitter.
US airline Delta said its website and app were working normally after being “briefly affected Thursday by a technical issue … that affected websites globally”. Customers had reported being unable to check in for flights during the outage.
The National was also affected.
What happened?
During the outage, which began on Thursday afternoon, websites did not load and displayed Domain Name System (DNS) service errors.
DNS, or Domain Name System, is a service that translates readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses, connecting it to a server and delivering the requested page on the user's phone or laptop.
Akamai, which provides the service to thousands of companies, said it was “aware of an emerging issue” with its Edge DNS service and urged customers to contact their technical support service. The company has not confirmed whether it was the source of the issue.
The service provider later said it had applied a fix for the problem and service was resuming. Its website said all systems were operational as of Thursday evening and the incident had been “mitigated".
After the outage ended, the company confirmed "a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites".
"This caused a disruption impacting availability of some customer websites," it said in a post.
Rolling back the software update fixed the problem, Akamai said, apologising for the trouble.
Database management company Oracle also pointed to an issue with Akamai's services.
“We are monitoring a global issue related to Akamai Edge DNS that is affecting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties. Resources within the Oracle cloud are continuing to run and are not affected by this event,” a company statement read.
The internet was hit by another major outage about a month ago when Cloud service company Fastly encountered an internal error. Websites like Amazon, Reddit and The Guardian were inaccessible for around an hour.
This issue was caused by a customer changing their settings, creating an internal bug in Fastly's systems, the company said.
Additional reporting from Agence France Presse
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Electoral College Victory
Trump has so far secured 295 Electoral College votes, according to the Associated Press, exceeding the 270 needed to win. Only Nevada and Arizona remain to be called, and both swing states are leaning Republican. Trump swept all five remaining swing states, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, sealing his path to victory and giving him a strong mandate.
Popular Vote Tally
The count is ongoing, but Trump currently leads with nearly 51 per cent of the popular vote to Harris’s 47.6 per cent. Trump has over 72.2 million votes, while Harris trails with approximately 67.4 million.
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TEACHERS' PAY - WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Pay varies significantly depending on the school, its rating and the curriculum. Here's a rough guide as of January 2021:
- top end schools tend to pay Dh16,000-17,000 a month - plus a monthly housing allowance of up to Dh6,000. These tend to be British curriculum schools rated 'outstanding' or 'very good', followed by American schools
- average salary across curriculums and skill levels is about Dh10,000, recruiters say
- it is becoming more common for schools to provide accommodation, sometimes in an apartment block with other teachers, rather than hand teachers a cash housing allowance
- some strong performing schools have cut back on salaries since the pandemic began, sometimes offering Dh16,000 including the housing allowance, which reflects the slump in rental costs, and sheer demand for jobs
- maths and science teachers are most in demand and some schools will pay up to Dh3,000 more than other teachers in recognition of their technical skills
- at the other end of the market, teachers in some Indian schools, where fees are lower and competition among applicants is intense, can be paid as low as Dh3,000 per month
- in Indian schools, it has also become common for teachers to share residential accommodation, living in a block with colleagues
