INTERNATIONAL: Just days after an obscure internet content delivery provider caused a global crash of major websites, it’s happened again. The websites and apps of dozens of financial institutions, airlines and other major companies went down for about 20 minutes on Thursday afternoon. The outage was at another little-known company called Akamai, based in Massachusetts in the United States.

Like Fastly, which experienced an outage earlier this month, causing internet havoc around the world, Acamai is also what’s known as a content delivery system provider. It has yet to comment on Thursday’s problem, which affected hundreds of its biggest clients.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange was down for 17 minutes; Virgin Australia’s website and guest contact centre also crashed, as did those of some U.S airlines. Even the Reserve Bank of Australia went offline. Those affected say most of their services were up and running after an hour or so but were working overtime to prevent any further problems.

The disruptions from Akamai come just days after many of the world’s top websites went offline briefly due to a problem with software at Fastly. It blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting. Brief internet service outages are not uncommon, but the recent incidents have underscored just how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the world wide web.