British Airways, Airbnb, HSBC, several other high-profile websites hit by outages

Dhaka: A content delivery company named Akamai Technologies has apologized after a software update in its services caused several high-profile websites such as British Airways, Airbnb, Barclays, and HSBC, to go down. However, service was restored shortly afterward.

In its apology, Akamai said, "At 15:46 UTC on June 22, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting the availability of some customer websites.”

"The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations. Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai's platform.”

"We apologize for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions."

During the outage, a message on the British Airways website read, "Service Unavailable - DNS failure. The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later."

And a message on Airbnb's site said, "This site can't be reached."

HSBC's website had a similar message.

Reports said there were other airlines and major companies who were also affected, as well as the 911 service on the east coast of the US.