A fairly major outage spread across the internet this morning. And as goes the internet, so go services that rely on said internet — including in streaming services. HBO Max is down in web browsers thanks to the outage, which appears to be due to an issue with various domain name servers. Akamai, a major DNS provider, cited "an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service."
DNS is the virtual address book for all things online, allowing one server to connect to another. And when DNS goes down, it tends to take a lot of things with it.
DownDetector — a website that tracks outages in real time — showed HBO Max as being hit hard. And sure enough, HBO Max was inaccessible in a web browser. The service — which now has 43 million subscribers worldwide — was still up on other platforms, however, such as Apple TV and on mobile devices.
And generally speaking, such outages tend to be relatively short-lived. (Though try telling that to someone who desperately wants to watch the new Gossip Girl.) So there's a good chance that by the time you read this HBO Max (and other services hit by the outage) will be back online.
Update: And sure enough, Akamai tweeted that it's got a fix in the works and that things are returning to normal.
We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated.July 22, 2021
Meanwhile, other major streaming services — like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and more — appear to be untouched. Good for them.
