A plethora of Web sites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd and Australia’s central bank went down briefly yesterday in the second global Internet outage in as many weeks.
Some of the outages, including those that affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd, were linked to a failure at Akamai Technologies Ltd, which helps clients manage Web services, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal affairs.
The Reserve Bank of Australia was forced to cancel a scheduled bond-buying operation yesterday, blaming “technical difficulties.”
Photo: AFP
A representative for Akamai in Asia did not respond to e-mails and calls seeking comment.
The widespread downtime recalled an hour-long global outage earlier this month, triggered by a software failure at content delivery platform Fastly Inc. The resultant cascading failures, which affected services from Amazon.com Inc to Shopify Inc and Stripe Inc, served as a stark reminder of how exposed the world’s biggest Web sites are to disruptions ranging from simple human error to a coordinated cyberattack.
Web site tracker Downdetector.com initially flagged hundreds of user complaints about outages affecting Southwest Airlines Co, Delta Air Lines Inc and Automatic Data Processing Inc. Other Web sites pinpointed included those operated by Vanguard, E-Trade and Navy Federal Credit Union.
Many of the affected Web sites recovered within the hour, some after rerouting to other providers. Companies including Hong Kong’s exchange and Southwest said they were investigating the incident, without elaborating.
“The pause in connectivity did not impact our operation,” Southwest said in an e-mailed response to questions.
It was unclear what triggered the incidents yesterday. In Fastly’s case, a valid software configuration change by one of its customers triggered a previously undiscovered bug, introduced during a May 12 software deployment. Fastly quickly identified an issue with its content delivery network and announced it was rolling out a fix just 46 minutes after acknowledging a problem. Sites began to spring back to life soon afterward.
Akamai is one of a number of high-level Web site and application hosting services that large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously.
Rather than hosting all Web site content on a single set of servers in one location, Fastly’s so-called “edge computing” model puts servers in dozens of locations, allowing Web sites to serve pages to users from physical locations closest to them. This cuts lag time, speeding up page-loading and spreading the burden on individual servers.
These vast and complex setups are run by just a few companies, such as Fastly and Cloudflare Inc.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six