Akamai Having Problems? 216
A reader writes:"It appears that sometime during the night, Akamai had some problems causing some connectivitly issues with many hosts thoughout the night. Akamai provides a DNS load balancing solution to many major internet companies/sites including (but notlimited to) Google, Yahoo, etc. Is it a bad idea to rely so heavily upon one service for our major internet needs? " Not much details - but I can confirm having problems this morning. Thanks to alert readers for pointing that they were having "DoS related issues" and that service was restored as of 1400 GMT.
Apple down, Microsoft up (Score:5, Informative)
apple trailers (Score:2, Informative)
Internet Storm Centre has a little (Score:5, Informative)
It appears that websites that use Akamai's distribution system are currently not reachable. Security related web sites effected are symantec.com and trendmicro.com. Virus updates may fail as a result. Further details are currently not available and updates will be posted here as they become available. Thanks to Vidar Wilkens for alerting us of this problem.
According to a post to NANOG, the outage may be the result of a DDOS attack. At this point, Akamai has not ETA for a resolution.
Update 09:45 EST: Looks like some of the Akamai hosted sites start to come back."
You gotta love that "Quiet, well kinda quiet". ;)
NOC Says: (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo had trouble for at least an hour or so. (Score:0, Informative)
Apple.com Slow down (Score:2, Informative)
Blueyonder UK
Discussed on Nanog... (Score:5, Informative)
Rus
Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it is a bad idea.
However, blame that on the other competing services who haven't become cheaper, faster or better at whatever it is that makes Akamai so popular.
eBay affected also (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I thought they do file hosting also (Score:5, Informative)
Notice on Akamai Control site (Score:5, Informative)
Due to a peering problem between ATT and UUNet, a subset of UUNet users may have experienced problems accessing Akamai delivered sites between 8-10pm EDT on Saturday May 22, 2004. The problem has been fully resolved.
from their support website (Score:5, Informative)
Due to a peering problem between ATT and UUNet, a subset of UUNet users may have experienced problems accessing Akamai delivered sites between 8-10pm EDT on Saturday May 22, 2004. The problem has been fully resolved.
Maybe the problem has recurred.
Re:Notice on Akamai Control site (Score:5, Informative)
Well, unless you have a *really* bad latency problem, I don't think that's going to be an issue with a problem on May 24th...
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:from their support website (Score:3, Informative)
Akamai says it's a bug in the software, not DDoS (Score:5, Informative)
Akamais distributed DNS & content solutions (Score:5, Informative)
This is nicely commented on in a recent story over at CFO [cfo.com] where it says "Broadly speaking, Akamai needs servers near the consumers of content..[] Akamai, on the other hand, has servers pretty much everywhere."
To trim the facts down a bit: Akamai has servers near by most users these days, and the distributed DNS gives you returning DNS to the closest contentserver. If I, who live in Norway, try to access fbi.gov from any computer from a ISP connected to the NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) I get a DNS response that leads me to Akamais servers in Oslo, Norway. I've tried this for some time, just to see what happens, with cnn.com, apple.com and fbi.gov. While on a trip to Sweden I tried this while connecting through a local DSL-provider and I got a response from a server located in Sweden, hence even the swedes have their own Akamai mirror these days.
The problems with a DDOS from someone in Norway would, if directed towards a domain or webpage and not an IP-address lead to downtime on that specific local mirror, not Akamais entire network. We can from this conclude that only such events as a major blackout in Akamais core network or like this time, DOS'ing their own network would take out their service.
Nothing to see here...move along. (Score:3, Informative)
Akamai was down from 8:00am to 9:15am (Score:3, Informative)
I spoke with Akamai support. They indicated that it was a far reaching problem, but I have not heard the reason yet.
The customer login to the admin portal was down as well. It was almost like someone dump the customer account database.
Akamai has a QOS commitment of 100% uptime based on the idea that not all of the 1,000's of servers could go down at the same time. But... There you go.
Re:i've always wondered... (Score:2, Informative)
Simple. Just like it looks.
Explaination from Akamai (Score:5, Informative)
This degradation was the result of a bug within one of Akamai's backend content control management tools, which allows the expiration of content on the Akamai network. The degradation was not a result of any outside interference with Akamai's network (such as Denial of Service or hacking).
Upon identification of the bug, Akamai quickly took corrective action which returned customers to normal service levels. Akamai is currently putting measures in place to return the content management tool to its normal working order and is adding safeguards such that the issue will not occur in the future. In the meantime, Akamai customers are able to serve their content through the Akamai Network normally.
As part of Akamai's normal proactive customer communication policy, Akamai customers will be kept informed of the latest developments through the Akamai portal, the EdgeControl Management Center, https://control.akamai.com. Any further inquiries may be directed at Akamai Customer Care at 1-877-4-AKATEC.
Re:latest advisory (Score:1, Informative)
An isolated issue occurred this morning (roughly during the period of 8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. ET), where multiple Akamai customers experienced intermittent performance and availability degradation.
This degradation was the result of a bug within one of Akamai's backend content control management tools, which allows the expiration of content on the Akamai network. The degradation was not a result of any outside interference with Akamai's network (such as Denial of Service or hacking).
Upon identification of the bug, Akamai quickly took corrective action which returned customers to normal service levels. Akamai is currently putting measures in place to return the content management tool to its normal working order and is adding safeguards such that the issue will not occur in the future. In the meantime, Akamai customers are able to serve their content through the Akamai Network normally."
We were affected too, this is the RCA.
Re:Apple down, Microsoft up (Score:2, Informative)
Disclaimer. I work for Speedera [speedera.com], an Akamai competitor.
Scalability and bandwidth (Score:3, Informative)
Akamai's competitors have different scaling tradeoffs. The last time I knew numbers was a couple of years ago, and it may have changed, but Akamai had a very large number of mostly small servers located on many carriers networks, AT&T had a couple hundred very large servers (mostly at peering points, which takes advantage of being a carrier, though they also bought some transit for content distribution), and Speedera was somewhere in between. AT&T's directions included lots of streaming media, and Akamai was doing fancy database things.