Australian companies, central bank hit by widespread net outages

Sydney: Australia's central bank, the postal service, and several commercial lenders as well as other companies grappled with internet outages on Thursday, disrupting customer accounts and financial transactions before some services were restored late in the day.

One of the companies affected, Virgin Australia, said it was "one of many organisations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system," though the situation was now resolved. The country's No. 2 airline said it used Akamai, a third-party system, for IT network authentication.