Dozens of national and international websites experienced technical problems on Thursday evening. The cause lay with network supplier Akamai. A little after 7 p.m. the problems were largely over.
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These include the sites of KBC, Delhaize, Airbnb and the websites and apps of media companies of DPG Media (including Het Laatste Nieuws, De Morgen, vtm).
The websites of Zalando and Airbnb are also experiencing problems.
Websites are also difficult or impossible to reach abroad. The outage affects FedEx, UPS and Amazon, among others. Also, the American emergency number 911 would largely be out along the west coast.
The cause apparently lies with Akamai, an American company that provides various network services. Akamai reports on his website that his ‘Edge DNS’ service is experiencing problems. A DNS (Domain Name Server) service translates the name of a website (for example, Zalando.com) by the IP address behind it (a series of numbers with periods in between). That translation is currently not working. At around 6:50 PM, Akamai reported via Twitter that the issue would be resolved and that everything should be working again soon. A little after 19:00 our time, most of the affected sites were indeed back to normal. According to Akamai, there is no question of a cyber attack, but the exact cause has not yet been reported by the company.
