Bank apps, RBA hit by mass outage

Customers across the country have been left unable to access their online banking after the second mass internet outage in as many weeks.

A major outage affected Australia’s banking apps and online services with CommBank, ANZ, and Westpac all reporting significant issues.

The tech glitch, thought to be caused by a service from tech provider Akamai, hit three of the big four banks, leaving users across the country unable to transfer or access their money for hours. It started at around 3pm and had been resolved by about 5pm.

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s website was also down, while Virgin Australia’s service was also affected.

We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating. We apologise and thanks for your patience, we’ll provide an update soon

— CommBank (@CommBank) June 17, 2021

Ok, we have a major online failure occurring at the moment, most likely some form of DNS provider outage, or attack. Affecting major banks, and Virgin Australia. Will keep updates here as I learn more pic.twitter.com/x7X0V26vzj

— Trevor Long (@trevorlong) June 17, 2021

System outage: Website and Guest Contact Centre. pic.twitter.com/6pybOK5G09

— Virgin Australia (@VirginAustralia) June 17, 2021

According to DownDetector.com.au, social media websites including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have also been impacted.

The outage was reportedly due to Akamai, through its Prolexic service.

“We are aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possiblem,” an Akamai spokesman said.

“Akamai is a venerable company and well respected globally, but as we've seen twice now in the last week, outages can happen to anyone,” Daniel D’Alessandro, co-founder of Australian provider Peakhour.io, said.

“The fact that so many key major organisations, and the critical services they deliver across Australia, can all be brought down simultaneously, due to whatever cause, indicates a critical need for redundancy. Companies routing their traffic through a third party, whether it’s a CDN, DDOS protection, or otherwise, all need a Plan B, just like with any other critical piece of their IT infrastructure."

It follows a similar issue last week in which a mass internet outage sent websites around the world down, including sites for the White House, the British government and international media.

Many websites both within Australia and internationally were affected, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and the Brisbane Times.

Internationally the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Financial Times were all impacted and unable to show any content.

The cause of that outage was a glitch with popular internet content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly, whose technology powers many websites globally.

The Fastly CDN outage lasted over an hour, costing some local businesses an estimated tens of thousands of dollars in lost income according to Marcus Thompson AM PhD, a retired Army officer and former Head of Information Warfare for the Australian Defence Force, who said the incident demonstrated the importance of Australia’s digital sovereignty.

“This was a technical outage, rather than a cyber attack, yet the effect on Australian businesses and people was the same,” Dr Thompson said.

“It calls into question our dependence on foreign service providers.

“We need to look closer to home for how we connect to the digital world around us. Australia has some of the greatest data and security skills in the world – the cost of not using that in terms of security and economic value is staggering.”

Andy Champagne, senior vice president of internet infrastructure provider Akamai, said “What people experienced today is just another reminder of how the internet is a lifeline for consumers and for businesses, and we have come to count on it being reliable and available to us when we need it.”