A Massive Outage Just Left A Bunch Of Canadians Without Access To Their Banking Apps
The company that caused the outage said it wasn't a cyberattack.
If you noticed your online banking app or internet wasn't working on Thursday, July 22, you weren't alone.
A huge outage caused thousands of websites and digital services across Canada to go down, including online banking services at RBC, ScotiaBank and BMO, as well as airlines, retailers and tech companies.
According to the website DownDetector, dozens of big Canadian companies received reports of outages at 12.30 p.m. EST.
So, how did it happen?
The cause of the outage was due to a "service incident" at cloud computing company Akamai. Based in Massachusetts, Akamai works behind the scenes to keep large parts of the internet around the world operating.
What is happening today with the banks? Why so many sites down? Just as well shut down the market for today geez. @RBC @scotiabank @TD_Canada— Wilson (@Wilson) 1626971313
All major banks in Canada are down right now. RBC, TD, BMO, and CIBC should get a better DNS provider like @Cloudflare smh..— Joseph Maxim \u2615\ufe0f (@Joseph Maxim \u2615\ufe0f) 1626972222
A spokesperson for the company posted on Twitter that, at 11:46 a.m. EST, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the system that directs browsers to websites. The disruption lasted for an hour.
The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations. Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai\u2019s platform. (2/3)— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai Technologies) 1626977294
Akamai apologized for the inconvenience and said it is reviewing how they roll out future software updates to avoid more disruptions.