A plethora of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. and Australia’s central bank went down briefly Thursday in the second global internet outage in as many weeks.
Some of the outages, including those that affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp. and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., were linked to a failure at Akamai Technologies Ltd., which helps clients manage web services, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal affairs. The Reserve Bank of Australia was forced to cancel a scheduled bond-buying operation Thursday, blaming “technical difficulties.” A representative for Akamai in Asia didn’t respond to emails and calls seeking comment.
