Akamai Having Problems?

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.

SBC?

[boschmorden]

Perhaps this is related to the SBC strike?

erm...

[REBloomfield]

So, you had a problem on the Inernet, no one else has reported this, on any or the mainstream news sites, and the whole Internet is coming to an end?

And this is *news*???

We do that already.

[Underholdning]

Is it a bad idea to rely so heavily upon one service for our major internet needs?
We do that already. Remember when verisign introduced Sitefinder, thus effectively making various services (like spam filters etc) unusable because non-existing domains all of a sudden replied with a valid IP.

Ah, knee-jerk reactions.

[jdreed1024]

Is it a bad idea to rely so heavily upon one service for our major internet needs?

I love how the first reaction when something goes wrong is to replace it, or introduce competiton, or whatever. Yes, there are plenty of times when a service needs competition to encourage it to suck less. But go find me another company that is even remotely prepared to do DNS load-balancing. Verisign? Oh, that's a great idea. Going to start one yourself? Let us know when you have the infrastructure.

The fact is, we have NO idea what caused this. There's no link to any story anywhere - just one reader report. It could be Akamai's fault. It could be their upstream providers. It could be failures elsewhere in the Internet. Could be someone uploaded a bad zone file. Or maybe some over-zealous backhoe operator slashed some fiber somewhere.

It's probably best to reserve judgement until you have all the facts. (And if you're about to hit the reply button, yes, I'd say the exact same thing if MSFT lost their DNS service).

Single Domino Theory Revisited

[dalillama]

People say that the Internet can't be knocked out. That may be true in the infra-structure sense, but if you're able to knock down Akamai or any other major solution provider, think of the sites that would go down (Google, Yahoo et al), and the repercution on the global economy. So yes, the domino theory doesn't apply to the Internet, but it becomes exponentially more dangerous when we rely on one domino for a significant share of of communications.

24/7 Application Uptime

[Stalus]

I guess this throws a wrench in their claim of 24/7 uptime on their main page. Nice how their marketing team says 100% availability, when people get PhD's by adding more 9's to their 99.99..%'s

Re:Ah, knee-jerk reactions.

[The_Mr_Flibble]

Akami host their clusters all over the planet it is a fully redundant service it would of had to be a major fault to cause it to go down.

Re:NOC Says:

[baudilus]

I wonder what kind of DOS attack could take down akamai? Their bandwidth is almost scary (I've downloaded stuff from them at well over 9 mbps from my home machine). I'd hate to think someone has enough bandwidth to attack them, unless it was some sort DDoS.

Re:erm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except this is news, as this outage caused major problems with bestbuy.com, amazon.com, yahoo.com, google.com, ichotelsgroup.com, and countless others.

Major news sites probably haven't covered this because this is "News for nerds."

Official Report

[ps]

is due within the hour. We're pulling out our SLAs to find out what recourse we have against them. We were down for almost 90 min.

Re:Nothing to see here...move along.

[jea6]

Nothing to see here...move along

Considering Akamai hosts the web sites for the like of the White House, FBI, and Dept of Homeland Security (among other gov't agencies), an Akamai outage is slightly more than "nothing to see here." Unless you are making a political statement, I guess.

Re:What about Bittorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bittorrent reduces the load on the central server by having everyone who downloads content upload content to other users. Couldn't a similar system be designed for HTTP connections?

What a great idea! Something like a distributed network of caching web proxies. Quick! Patent this immediately!

Young whippersnappers just don't know any better. And you idiot moderators who rated it +5 interesting. squid faq or NLANR [ircache.net].

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