Australian govt agencies, banks, corporations went offline due to routing table error

[gary]

Forget cyber attacks from overseas agents.

It transpires that much of Australia's infrastructure is dependent on
a single global content delivery network (CDN) company headquartered
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Akamai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies).

Yesterday, not a cyber attack, but a routing table entry error in a computer
at Akamai took offline many of the services of three of the four big
Australian Banks, Virgin Australia, American, Southwest, United and Delta
Airlines in the US, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Australia Post and
hundreds of other corporations and government agencies around the world.

Disturbingly, someone in government had decided it was a real good idea
to entrust the computing services of Australia's central bank - the Reserve
Bank of Australia - to a private company in Massachusetts.

There was a scheduled buying of Australian Government Bonds by the
Reserve Bank (aka printing money with your own IOU), that had to
be cancelled due to the Akamai outage.

On Wednesday afternoon, Australia Post was unable to accept international
parcel deliveries and yesterday, Thursday afternoon, they were unable
to process both international and domestic parcel shipments. I stood in
the post office looking at the growing piles of boxes sitting idle. A woman
behind me said, "I've just come from a petrol station. It is chaos. People
can't pay".

It certainly is a major wake-up call that so much Australian infrastructure
is dependent on the minute-by-minute reliability of a single private US
corporation, let alone any dependency whatsoever by the likes of
the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Story here :-
https://fortune.com/2021/06/17/yet-more-online-outages-hit-banks-and-airlines-akamai-cdn-ceo-daily/

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/internet-outages-hit-virgin-australia-australian-lenders-2021-06-17/

Some technical background :-

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/major-banks-online-services-eftpos-airline-systems-go-down-566080

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/akamai-routing-error-caused-widespread-outages-566103

[xelasnave]

Time to start prepping.
Alex

[multiweb]

It just shows how reliant we've become and tied up to technology for essential services. We should head half way in the other direction and focus on resilience for a change. Until the next solar flare. ;)

[Outcast]

I think it's worse than that Marc, this shows how reliant we've become on outsourcing everything!!

[Hans Tucker]

So .. you want us to go Amish? Tis an interesting plan English.

[multiweb]

:lol::lol::lol: That's a long way down to cold showers.

[RB]

Cold showers aren’t too bad, they serve a purpose.

:lol: :lol:

[multiweb]

:lol::lol::lol: for those who get too excited about the Hamish way.

[Peter Ward]

In a previous life I worked on the ground for Ansett Airlines, (circa 1980) who at the time were introducing their computerized "AnsaBoard" check-in system.

I asked the question at the time, what happens when the system crashes?

Management's response was: "that won't happen" (I was a Sysop for a large financial company before that..and knew their answer was pure BS)

Day one of AnasBoard's launch...system crashed.

Seems not much has changed in the interim.....

[lazjen]

These systems can be made more resilient - there's various means to do so. In most cases though it will be overlooked or most likely considered too much cost by "management".

[Peter Ward]

LOL.

Indeed.

My computer science lecturer made this prediction as to when assignments need to be submitted.

DEC-System 10 will be down the night before the submission date!
(this was 6 months prior)

So don't even try to use that as an excuse.

[multiweb]

I reckon there should be a clear distinction between convenience and practicality with essential services and a lot of aspects of our life. When the building is burning with you inside would you rather say "hey Google, open the front roller shutter door" or have a good old fashion mechanical crank as a backup?

[blindman]

True

[TrevorW]

and they want us to move to a cashless society what BS, start buying gold and silver fellas :)