Major websites briefly go down in global outage

NHK -- Jul 24

The Japanese government's cybersecurity body says many public- and private-sector websites briefly went down early Friday.

The problem is believed to have been caused by a glitch in a network service provided by a US IT firm.

The National center of Incident readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity says the outage began at around 16:00 UTC on Thursday.

The websites of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics organizing committee, East Japan Railway Company, Japan Airlines, Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fujitsu and others were affected. Those of foreign businesses were also disrupted.

IT firm Akamai Technologies posted on Twitter that its software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, causing the disruption.