In general, dependence on the internet occasionally causes damage that goes beyond the digital: a coordinated hacker attack brought more than 30,000 websites to a standstill.

The websites of several US companies reported major disruptions in operation on Thursday (22), according to the portal Downdetector.

This Thursday (22), many of the largest US companies reported major interruptions in the operation of their websites, according to information from the Downdetector portal.

The list includes giants Microsoft, Google, Amazon; the Steam software; McDonald's fast food chain; the Airbnb app; the HBO Max website; the systems of shipping and delivery companies FedEx and UPS; in addition to gaming sites, banks and others.

Many users have reported DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach those sites, but the source of the problem remains unclear.

Cloud service provider Akamai Technologies has issued an alert on the "Edge DNS" service incident, noting that it is investigating said "partial outage". The company also confirmed that the problem was not the result of a cyber attack on the platform.

We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm this was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform.
— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021

​We continue to monitor the situation and can confirm that it was not the result of a cyber attack on the Akamai platform.

According to the Independent newspaper, the widespread interruption likely means that something has broken in the Internet's infrastructure, not problems with the companies that run the sites.
Previous failures

This is the third major Internet outage in two months. Previously, airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms experienced brief outages due to a bug in the service, which was later identified as a problem with the Fastly provider.

Even a small problem at one of these companies can make much of the Internet go offline very quickly, as there are a very limited number of organizations that provide infrastructure to support the entire Internet.

In fact, several cryptocurrency exchange sites have stopped.

Several routers and redirectors from pancakeswap.finance have stopped. With this it is estimated that day trades lost something close to 28 billion dollars, today alone.

Day traders are investors who win on the bet of quick rise of a certain asset, leaving the investment in the asset for no more than a few hours.

This makes these people need to spend all their time in the financial analysis windows, to know the exact moment to enter and exit the asset.

As a result, several investors entered into assets and were unable to exit or were not guarded to enter and did not succeed.

Thus, not only investors lost, but the global business volume also dropped, as etherscan and, with that, when it returned, it made bitcoin and ethereum value.

But, finally, it makes you think: how fragile is a system that depends exclusively on the internet and that, in case of failure, makes all investments evaporate?