Juan J. Monroe 
A screenshot of a Virgin Australia website, which appears to be down, is seen as Australian airline Virgin Australia and the country’s major lenders grapple with internet outages, June 17, 2021. /via REUTERS
Sydney: Australia’s central bank, postal service and several commercial lenders and other businesses grappled with internet outages on Thursday, disrupting customer accounts and financial transactions before some services were restored at the end of daytime.
One of the companies affected, Virgin Australia, said it was “one of many organizations to experience an outage of Akamai’s content delivery system”, although the situation is now resolved.
The country’s No. 2 airline said it used Akamai, a third-party system, for computer network authentication.
Akamai representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Many other websites in Australia, including those belonging to the central bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, had also started to come back online by late Thursday afternoon.
The Reserve Bank of Australia canceled an operation to buy long-term government bonds due to technical difficulties.
Websites of major US airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines
It was not immediately clear if the outages in Australia and the United States were related.
The outages, mostly in Australia on Thursday, come just over a week after thousands of government, news and social media websites around the world were hit by a widespread technical glitch linked to US company Fastly Inc. .
