Australian and U.S. banks and airlines suffer brief online outages Thursday.
Several banks blamed an “external provider” for the disruption . Outages began around 2:10PM Sydney time (0510 GMT) and did not appear to be limited to the banking sector. Problems appeared to be more prolonged in Australia, with services only slowly returning an hour after the first reports were made.
Earlier this month major US media and government websites were temporarily down after a glitch with cloud computing services provider Fastly. The White House, New York Times, Reddit and Amazon were some of the more prominent victims of the glitch earlier this month.
After a series of high profile hack-for-ransom attacks corporations are left jittery over cybersecurity risks, although there is no indication the latest problems were caused by malicious actors.
The issue of cybersecurity was at the top of the agenda when US President Joe Biden and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin met in Geneva this week. The issue was discussed in Geneva. The U.K. Government and Washington believe hackers who have extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from Western governments, companies, and organizations operate from Russian soil.
