Dozens of major Web sites, including Netflix, Uber and the BBC, went down simultaneously on Thursday in some areas of the US, but were soon up again in most cases.
The cause of the crashes remained unclear, but some appeared connected to trouble at a cloud service relied on by the companies, although that did not stop the social media rumor and conspiracy mill from going into overdrive.
“We’re aware that members are experiencing issues streaming on all devices,” streaming television service Netflix said in a tweet at its customer service Twitter account.
“We’re working to resolve the problem,” it said.
Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said the outage was the result of “technical issues” at an UltraDNS cloud service provided by Neustar and affected mostly US subscribers.
“UltraDNS is working to address the issue,” Evers said. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Neustar confirmed in a tweet that there was an issue with its UltraDNS.
Internet trouble tracker CurrentlyDown.com displayed a list of two dozen Web sites that were or had been out of service during the day.
The list also included Ameritrade — an online broker — and The Economist.
It was unclear whether all those affected relied on UltraDNS, but ride-sharing service Uber blamed its problems on that.
The outages sparked chatter at Twitter and other social networks.
“Netflix, HBOGo, Chase Bank, Uber, ETrade... all Web sites down at the same time. Coincidence or Cyber Attack?” tweeted Joseph Colarusso from the Twitter account @jcolarusso.
The UltraDNS service was hit by an outage affecting customers in the eastern US late afternoon local time, according to Neustar spokeswoman Lara Wyss.
“We can confirm this is not a DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack,” Wyss said, referring to a style of cyberattack in which Web sites are intentionally overloaded with requests for service and crash under the stress.
Most of the Web sites that stumbled or fell were back up and running by mid-evening East Coast time, according to CurrentlyDown.
“Some of our clients experienced sporadic difficulty accessing some of our Web sites,” Ameritrade said.
“Once clients were able to log in there were no issues,” it said.
Netflix said that UltraDNS did not hurt the entire service, just some people trying to tune in.
Cloud-based DNS services essentially route traffic to Web sites.
“It’s kind of a road map,” Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said.
“The roads are still in place, but if the map goes away nobody knows where to go,” he said.
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