Approximatly 500 customers affected.
Akamai apologised for a routing error. The error was detected within the company’s Prolexic distributed denial-of-service mitigation platform. This saw banking users based in Australia and New Zealand unable to access accounts and other services over the internet on 17 June.
The routing error was thought to have affected approximatly 500 customers who are on the Prolexic routed version 3.0 service, and was first noticed at 2.20pm AEST.
In Akamai’s brief of the outage it was said that a routing table used by this service was inadvertently exceeded.
Akamai said, “The effect was not a planned or anticipated discruption of service.” The company also added the issue was not caused by a cyber attack or system update.
Several online banking website and associated mobile applications were incaccessible during the outage period.
Banks affected included Westpac, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, ASB, St Gerorge, Macquarie Bank and ME Bank.
Virgin Australia also experienced service disruption, as did Australia Post.
Akamai commented by re-routing most of the 500 affected customers they were able to restore banking services for them.
Akamai has since apologised for the outage after services were restored by 8.47 pm for all Prolexic Routed 3.0 customers.
The company added. “We have taken steps to prevent a recurrence of this issue”
There were some other issues that were also fixed during the manual re-routing of Prolexic. One such issue was related to an issue where customers were logging in while their machines were offline and were not able to enter any information.
A Prolexic support representative had manually re-routed this customer’s IP address before the customer had entered any information, and therefore was creating a security risk. The Prolexic engineer responsible for this problem was able to fix this problem quite easily, and posted details of the fixes in the support website. Other issues that were fixed during this maintenance period included issues where Prolexic was being accidentally redirected to false IP addresses, and where DNS names were getting randomly assigned. All of these issues are relatively easy to correct by using the official Prolexic router’s manual.
