Internet banking for Australian banks has been impacted as a global outage affects websites and apps.
The websites of major banks like ANZ and Commonwealth Bank were timing out for customers on Thursday afternoon.
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Internet banking for Australian banks has been shut down due to a global downtime that impacts apps and websites
Bank of Melbourne and Westpac were also reported to be unavailable to users, as well as banks in New Zealand.
Customers were alerted via the ANZ app that "Something went wrong." If you need help you can call us anytime.'
Customers were alerted via the ANZ app that "Something went wrong." If you need assistance contact us anytime'
A few ATMs were reported to be out of commission too with reports of ATMs in stores malfunctioning during the outage.
A problem at the international content delivery network platform Akamai - which supplies the backbone of major online services - is believed to be the cause of the crash.
There were also reports of ATMs not being of action, and in-store machines reported an outage.
The data on the internet watchdog downdetector.com.au revealed the extent of the outage, with all major banks affected as well as blue chip companies like Telstra and Optus.
Amazon, Minecraft, Australia Post and the NBN website were also the victims of the crash, according to the website.
Services started to resume service at 3.35pm on Thursday, around 90 minutes after the first reports of problems.
Despite the return of other websites, Virgin Australia's website wasn't affected.
Peakhour.io is an Australian CDN company, stated that the most recent outage affecting these large corporations highlights the fact that any network can fail.
A Content Delivery Network is a global cloud-based computer network designed to improve the speed, security, and reliability of the websites of their customers.
CDNs typically create multiple copies of their websites for their customers and distribute and cache them all over the world as explained by peakhour co-founder Daniel D'Alessandro
'People browsing a website will be served from the closest cache, making the website appear faster and more responsive by removing the limitations of distance and bandwidth between the server and client.
CDNs can also improve the reliability of websites - users will often not notice if the actual website goes down, as long as the caches are operational.
"Many CDN providers also deliver cyber security solutions too - blocking attack traffic closest to where it originates, long before it gets anywhere near the target.'
Hackers often try to disable websites and apps using a technique called DDOS or distributed denial of service. This is where they create a massive surge of traffic at certain weak points of a network to overload it.
He said, "Akamai is a venerable and well-known company however, as we've witnessed two times in the last week, outages are possible for anyone.
"The fact that so many large organizations and the crucial services they offer across Australia could be affected at the same time, regardless of the cause is a signal that there is a critical need to redeploy.
'Companies routing their traffic through a third party, whether it's a CDN, DDOS protection, or any other reason, all require a Plan B, just like any other vital piece of their IT infrastructure.
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