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.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
RSS