Akamai’s Edge DNS service is one of the largest “internet infrastructure” services. Edge DNS serves financial institutions, travel companies, media players, and other cloud services.
But with great power comes great responsibility.  Edge DNS crashed today, taking a chunk of the internet with it. Reportedly, Oracle Cloud was also down around the same time. For a few hours, it was DEFCON 1 for IT people everywhere. Not great.
Internet infrastructure has become more and more centralized over the years. A handful of companies (like Cloudflare, Fastly, Azure CDN, and Akamai) have turned into keymasters of the free web.
Generally, these few companies do a great job. The bad news?? They crash every once in a while, causing headaches for companies and their customers (us). FedEx, Amazon, Airbnb, and HBO Max were among the companies affected by today’s outage.
Fortunately, Akamai’s product was down for about two hours before the company restored service.