CBA, ANZ and Westpac banking apps down amid wider outage

Services on the websites started to come back up online just before 4pm, with financial services industry sources saying they believed the problem involved content delivery network Akamai.

Reached via phone, senior Australian Akamai executive Steve Preston declined to comment to The Australian Financial Review, instead referring enquiries to a Singapore-based colleague, who did not answer their phone, or respond to messages.

The outage began at 2pm AEST, and sources said it was related to Akamai’s Prolexic service, which is a platform used by organisations to protect against distributed denial of service attacks.

This does not mean the outages are caused by cyber attack attempts. The cause of the Prolexic problems has not yet been disclosed.

Meanwhile, across Asia more broadly, several websites including that of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing as well as Delta and Southwest Airlines came back online after what appeared to be a brief outage.

Outage website Downdetector initially flagged hundreds of user reports from Southwest Airlines, Delta and Automatic Data Processing Inc.

HKEX said in a tweet it was aware its websites were experiencing technical difficulties.

Some other websites, including those for Vanguard, E-Trade, Navy Federal Credit Union, still appear to be having challenges.