Internet outage disrupts services

SYDNEY: Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US were briefly hit by an internet outage yesterday, after a second major blackout in little more than a week.

The Australian outage, which also affected the country’s central bank, was caused by glitches on the servers of Akamai, an operator of content delivery network services used in speeding up the delivery of dataheavy content, videos and games to web pages.

The outage disrupted services at many Australian banks, while the Reserve Bank of Australia had to drop its plan to buy long-dated government bonds because of technical difficulties.