Major banks, airlines hit by internet outages

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States 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 (CDN) services used in speeding up the delivery of data-heavy content, videos and games to web pages.

The impacted platform is now up and running, an Akamai spokesperson said.

Reuters could not establish any reason behind hour-long disruptions at major US airlines.

The outages predominantly in Australia on Thursday come little more than a week after thousands of government, news and social media websites around the world were hit by a technical issue linked to Fastly Inc.