U.S. airlines got hit, as did Australian banks and other services.
Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
The physical underpinnings of our digital economy—the infrastructure that makes up the Internet—are mostly very resilient. The Internet is a network of networks after all; knock one part out, and the rest remains operational.
However, the way we use the Internet has become increasingly dependent on a small number of content-delivery networks, or CDNs, that…well, deliver content. Through networks of data centers sited around the world, they ensure that the services people use and the content they read are delivered to their eyeballs as quickly as possible, and at as high a quality as possible. The bigger the portfolio of localized servers, the bigger the benefit for users scattered around the world.
This does not seem to be a good month for CDNs.
Just over a week ago, one of the biggest—Fastly—had an outage that knocked out scores of content providers for around an hour. The incident impacted everyone from the New York Times and the White House to Reddit and the Twitch livestreaming platform. Even Amazon got taken out for many users; ironically, its retail website relies on Fastly rather than Amazon’s own CloudFront CDN.
And here we go again. Akamai, another one of the biggest CDN providers, just suffered an outage that took out the websites of the big U.S. airlines—American, Southwest, United, Delta—while also whacking Australia’s banking sector, postal service, and again some airlines (Virgin Australia, whose gate crew reportedly were unable to access their IT systems for half an hour). The Reserve Bank of Australia also fell victim to the incident and reportedly had to cancel an operation to buy long-dated government bonds.
Although details are scarce, the problem this time appears to have been something to do with another one of Akamai’s key services, for mitigating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. With Fastly, it was an “undiscovered software bug.”
A lot of attention is—quite rightly—given to the risks posed to our online world by DDoS attacks, ransomware and other manifestations of cybercrime. But every company’s IT department should bear in mind that the way we run things these days also allows more benign incidents to have major, disruptive effects. Here’s hoping the frequency isn’t going to keep increasing.
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Separately, the U.S. House of Representatives has agreed to make June 19th, or “Juneteenth,” a federal holiday to commemorate the end of legal slavery of Black Americans in 1865. The Senate passed the bill Tuesday and President Biden is expected to sign it into law this afternoon.
Fortune will be celebrating Juneteenth tomorrow, so CEO Daily will return to your inboxes on Monday.
More news below.
David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
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This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
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