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The Internet Businesses

Akamai Having Problems? 216

Posted by Hemos from the problems-around dept.
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.
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Akamai Having Problems? More

Akamai Having Problems?

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  • SBC? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boschmorden ( 610937 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:15AM (#9237452)
    Perhaps this is related to the SBC strike?

  • Apple down, Microsoft up (Score:5, Informative)

    by Götz ( 18854 ) <waschk.gmx@net> on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:16AM (#9237464) Homepage
    I can confirm problems accessing the apple.com trailers, but microsoft.com has no problems. I thought they were using Akamai's services as well?

  • apple trailers (Score:2, Informative)

    by pinky99 ( 741036 )
    yes, i noted also it, when i wanted to watch new movie trailers at apple's qt site, which is appearantly and unfortunately hosted by akamai.

  • I thought they do file hosting also (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nev4 ( 721804 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:16AM (#9237477)
    Akamai also hosts files (images, binaries) for many major websites. Seems like they have some pretty insane bandwidth too...

    • Re:I thought they do file hosting also (Score:5, Informative)

      by r_cerq ( 650776 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:34AM (#9237653)
      No, they don't need to. Akamai's model is to install a bunch of their own machines (a PoP) in each and every middle-to-large ISP. They then use source-based DNS to direct requests to the nearest PoP (with some luck, it'll be within your ISP's network). They basically work as a smart reverse-proxy. You make your request to their PoP, and the PoP serves the content from cache. If you happen to be the first person requesting said content, the PoP will fetch it from the originating server (Apple, MS, CNN, whatever) and cache it to serve following request.
      • A lot of conent is also pre-pushed. For instance if Apple is going to have an ad campaign involving quicktime movies available from apple.com they will pre-push the content to Akami's servers several days ahead of time so that there is not a sudden rush of requests from Akami's cache engines crushing everything else.
      • No, Akamai as a whole really does have humongous amount of bandwidth, it's just distributed among 14000+ small machines. Their web site says they crank out "40 GPS", which is probably gigabits per second rather than gigabytes per second, so that's about 3 Mbps per machine, and that's probably aggregate peak delivered bandwidth, but most of their machines probably have a lot more capacity than that (10 Mbps would seem to be obvious for the smaller Ethernet-connected ones), because different machines will be

    • Re:I thought they do file hosting also (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Misch ( 158807 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:41AM (#9237716) Homepage
      Like Livejournal [livejournal.com]. They use Akamai for hosting userpics. This morning my buddy list was having trouble loading the images. (as they note here [livejournal.com].)

  • Having problems? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MarkGriz ( 520778 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:17AM (#9237480)
    Posting a link to their website on Slashdot should help them out.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:17AM (#9237482)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Not a problem with having one company (Score:5, Funny)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:17AM (#9237484) Homepage Journal
    I don't think it's a problem to go with one company. As long as that company has a distributed solution with many uplink providers. So, basically redundancy when something happens because no matter how good you are there will always be hickups.

  • Internet Storm Centre has a little (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:18AM (#9237497) Homepage
    "Akamai problems. Quiet, well kinda quiet, day on the Internet Update (Mon. May 24th 9 am EST, 13:00 UTC, 15:00 CEST)

    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". ;)

  • Perhaps.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:19AM (#9237502)
    Perhaps it is because of karmatic [slashdot.org] pretending to be posting mirrors of various stories on Slashdot over the last 24 hours, but instead using Akamai as an open proxy to mirror the sites for him:
    • here [slashdot.org]
    • here [slashdot.org]
    • here [slashdot.org]
    • here [slashdot.org]
    Nice bit of bandwidth theft, there.
    • hmmm, that is pretty cheeky actually

    • Re:Perhaps.... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I remember doing that a few years back ;-)

      I just went to akamai's site to see if they have any terms of use or anything but all I see is a blank page, so it must be ok.

  • We do that already. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Underholdning ( 758194 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:19AM (#9237505) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • NOC Says: (Score:5, Informative)

    by j0keralpha ( 713423 ) * on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:19AM (#9237506)
    Akamai's NOC says service restored approx 1400GMT. Earlier NOC quotes include: It is a system-wide problem that "looks like it may be a DOS attack".

    • Re:NOC Says: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by baudilus ( 665036 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:35AM (#9237661)
      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.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:57AM (#9237848)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Akamais system will cache anything it is asked to (other comments in this thread link to pages that tell you how to use Akamai to get around censorship of sites, or to cache your own material) so I guess all the DOSers would have to do is to tell each local Akamai box in each rack to cache, say, a few thousand large files each that they do not already cache?

        In this way a few thousand bytes of http requests could make the Akamai servers *EACH* attempt to fetch terrabytes, or more, of data...

  • Apple.com Slow down (Score:2, Informative)

    by koniosis ( 657156 )
    Me and a lot of people I know have been having issues with apple.com specifically the quick time trailers section. Download speeds hit rock bottom, at about 200bytes/second on a 3MB cable connection. As I said, this was a number of people experiencing the same speeds.

    Blueyonder UK

  • What really happened... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fulkkari ( 603331 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:22AM (#9237526)

    The cleaning lady needed electricity to her vacuum cleaner.

    Poor sysadmins.

    • The notorious cleaning lady [akamaitech.net]...
    • No joke:

      In 1997 I worked for a local ISP, and sometimes in the evening around 7pm (when no one of us was in the offices), some of the servers were unreachable for a few minutes and rebooted. We investigated for months! Unfortunately it didn't happen, when we stayed there afterhours - so we had no clue what went on.

      Finally we discovered it was the cleaning lady, that unplugged one of the servers to plug in his vacuum cleaner...

      Now the servers are locked up in a room, where only authorised personnel has

  • Discussed on Nanog... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:22AM (#9237528) Homepage
    NANOG Archieve [merit.edu]

    Rus

  • Answer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:22AM (#9237531)
    Is it a bad idea to rely so heavily upon one service for our major internet needs?

    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.

    • I'd say it's near a natural monopoly... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:17AM (#9238033) Homepage
      ...for those that don't know, a market where it is unprofitable to be the 2nd company around (usually, you can sell cheap because the major company wants to reap profits). A small "Akamai" competitor is no competitor at all, really. You need to have a similar huge network in order to compete. They would undoubtably clash and one would come out as the winner.

      So well, if it hadn't been Akamai it'd probably be someone else. Of course, one company can still build a helluva redundant network, if they want to... it's just usually not cost-efficient.

      Kjella

  • Ah, knee-jerk reactions. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:22AM (#9237532)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dalillama ( 770418 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:23AM (#9237541) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stalus ( 646102 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:24AM (#9237548)
    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:24/7 Application Uptime (Score:4, Interesting)

      by djh101010 ( 656795 ) * on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:42AM (#9238283) Homepage Journal
      I've been using Akamai for several years now at work, this is the first time we've had any interruption. The bandwith they serve for us for a couple grand a month offsets about 3 times as much cost if we had to bring it in ourselves, our customers get pages in half the time (better than that further away), and with the exception of this morning, _it just works_.

      Wish I could point to one of my servers here that hasn't been down unexpectedly in 2 years. I don't think I can. It's cheaper, it's faster, and it's more reliable than trying to serve that content from here; even with this downtime, it's still the appropriate solution.

      Now, if they go down _again_, without explaination, it could get messy.

  • YIKES! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ZHaDoom ( 65485 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:26AM (#9237577) Homepage
    I hope its not my fault. I knocked out 3 of akamai servers with a router problem =(

  • They just found the culprit (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The outage was apparently related to a DDOS attack against project Gutenberg that started this morning.
  • At work we lost connectivity to a handful of remote sites located in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast. Other sites in the same region but different cities were not affected. I was told it was a fiber cut on AT&T's backbone.. wonder if it has anything to do with this.

  • Report from Akamai (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:29AM (#9237601)
    Our Akamai rep tells us that it was an issue with a software version rollout. They flushed all their image caches, and effectively caused a DOS on themselves.

  • Silly Akamai (Score:3, Funny)

    by avisdream ( 770669 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:33AM (#9237637)
    I've had so many problems with akamai as of late...it seemingly has a monopoly over just about any commercial website I'm interested in. I don't see images very often while I'm at work...they just idle. Maybe it's a sign that I should stop shopping when I'm supposed to be working :(
    • That's not silly, it just means Akamai is the best at what they do. Maybe an event like this will be a wake-up call and lead to diversification on popular sites or the rise of competing companies.
    • You're probably behind a net-nanny type filter that blocks anything with "akamai" in the URL - at least one of them defaults to that behavior.

      At a certain usage point, it made sense for us to switch from a g123.a.akamai.net/blah/blah type URL to one that has our company's name in it, which is cnamed over to an akamai server. So, the URL looks like a host in our domain to the customers (and their filtering software), but resolves through the cname to the nearest akamai edge server to them. It's more compl

  • Closer to home (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

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

    Yeah. Duh. But, where else can I get a /. fix?

  • eBay affected also (Score:2, Informative)

    by jelevy01 ( 574941 )
    I couldn't get to eBay this morning either. It seems to be resolved now though.
    • eBay was the one that I noticed, though my wife later complained that Yahoo! was unresponsive. Surprisingly (or not, I guess, due to my local caching DNS) Google was still working well...

  • WORM_AGOBOT.GN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was unable to get to the sites for the major AV Vendors this morning. I chalk it up to Agobot as it
    DDOS's their sites. See the following link:

    http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/def au lt5.asp?VName=WORM_AGOBOT.GN&VSect=T

  • Notice on Akamai Control site (Score:5, Informative)

    by Reckless Visionary ( 323969 ) * on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:37AM (#9237680)
    Akamai has posted a notice on the website customers use to get reporting and manage content.

    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.

  • DNS flaky for the last 90 days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:38AM (#9237690)
    As a small company we have a limited view of the Internet, but it seems to us that there have been DNS and connectivity problems thoughout the Internet for the last 90 days or so. I was guessing that there was a DDoS attack against the root DNS servers that wasn't being reported. This would seem to be along the same lines.

    sPh
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • > Would it not be more likely that your ISP is
        > having problems? Or do you send all requests
        > directly to the root servers?

        Our ISP is a pretty big one, and we use djbdns which I believe goes to the roots if the lookup is not cached.

        Still, your questions are good ones and we have asked ourselves the same things. Usually when response seems slow in the office it is also slow on various cable and DSL services at employee's homes too though.

        Maybe I am just getting old and cranky: "When I was youn
    • I've noticed this as well. One of our home PCs (four years old, Windows ME, because I like comparing it to the XP machines) has stopped connecting to our ISP's servers -- no email, no newsgroups -- but I can still hit the internet just fine, with a noticeable three-second-or-so delay in connecting to anything after I've typed a location and pressed [Enter].

      Agent (newsreader) reports a winsock error (10060, connection to server timed out) and Outlook (email) reports that the connection was unexpectedly term
    • Comcast has been having lots of DNS problems, so I used Posadis (http://www.possadis.org) as what amounts to a caching DNS server on my local network.

      The new version works very well, and will make your network connection seem much faster.

  • What about Bittorrent? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KhalidBoussouara ( 768934 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:39AM (#9237706) Homepage
    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? Obviously it would be designed with much smaller files in mind and with less overhead.

    I realise no one give a shit about some large company's bandwith but for small community sites it could really make a difference. They wouldn't have to pay for a company to mirror their site and would save on bandwith costs.

    This wouldn't work for server side scripts (as the HTML output would be different for every user) but for static HTML and images it would be perfect.

  • from their support website (Score:5, Informative)

    by john_uy ( 187459 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:44AM (#9237743)
    Advisories

    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.

  • I was having all kinds of problems browsing the web last night: about half the sites I tried to visit (including slashdot and freebsd.org) simply failed to connect. The others were perfectly fine. I didn't see any pattern to it, but I wasn't looking very hard.

    Since I've had problems like this with my ISP, I figured it was something local. I guess not.

    OK, moderate me redundant because now I see a million other people saw the same thing...

  • for the past few minutes, i was actually searching for any news regarding akamai downtime (and here it is.) i thought it was just a local problem. but when i tried most to test different servers, they were unpingable a while ago. tried to get to ping and do traceroute from different lg and traceroute sites and all ended in * * *.

    maybe they autoupdated all their servers and made them reboot?

    let's see what updates they have on their support site.

    :)

  • Official Report (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ps ( 21245 )
    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.
    • I realize I haven't the slightest idea what sort of business you are in, but I'm a little surprised to see you reaching for the SLA so quickly. I understand that recourse for outages is the who reason for a SLA, but have you had problems before? Are you going to pursue this if it turns out the problem wasn't the result of negligience and they made good faith efforts to get things resolved?

      It's completely plausable that a 90 minute outage is a big deal for you, but I have to wonder if it was such a big d

  • I've noted a big problem... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eggplant62 ( 120514 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:51AM (#9237792)
    .. with akamai-hosted sites that has an odd effect in Mozilla Firefox 0.8 on Linux. A combination of Firefox doing an unnecessary reverse lookup on the IP that's being connected to (this is in addition to the regular forward lookup to get the IP, and waits until timeout, usually 30 seconds) and akamai's lack of any reverse zones configured for their boxes.

    A buddy of mine worked through further diagnosis to reveal this problem and registered a bug report with the MozDev team, however, after he contacted Google to inform them of the problem, they put in a blank in-addr.arpa zone file for their IP's, which resulted in an immediate negative result on that reverse zone lookup. If the rest of akamai would get on the stick and do the same, the problem would be history.
  • I've noticed that akamai seems to carry an mx record for www.spamcop.net. As of the last couple of days. I can't seem to resolve bl.spamcop.net -- is this the same issue? Anone else having this problem?
    • bl.spamcop.net isn't a host - it's never been possible to resolve it. To get a result, you have to look up something like 1.0.0.127.bl.spamcop.net. The DNS for spamcop.net is handled by Akamai (because Akamai handle some of the website processing), but the DNS for the BL isn't - Akamai's servers delegate that to a server hosted at Spamcop, and a few mirrors elsewhere.

      The Akamai issue did indeed affect www.spamcop.net, but I don't think your problems are related to that.

  • michaelmoore.com (Score:4, Funny)

    by dario_moreno ( 263767 ) * on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:53AM (#9237816) Journal
    seems also to be down. I was trying to access it after the Cannes result, and thought the US government had censored it...
    • [michaelmoore.com] seems also to be down. I was trying to access it after the Cannes result, and thought the US government had censored it...

      That, my friend, takes a special kind of paranoia.
  • As seen on http://alpha.cesmail.net/graphics/spamstats.gif

  • Akamai says it's a bug in the software, not DDoS (Score:5, Informative)

    by tsu doh nimh ( 609154 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:03AM (#9237895)
    A guy I spoke with this morning at Akamai said this morning that the problem was NOT the result of any outside attack on the company's servers. Rather, he said, the problem stemmed from a bug within a tool that allows customers to purge old content and update their cache with new content. Akamai said the problem lasted about 90 minutes, and affected numerous Akamai customers. No response, though, as to why this bug suddenly reared its head.

  • Haha (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 )
    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?

    Don't you see the irony? How much of the internet populace depends on Google for their searching needs?

    I suspect the problem here, as there, is that there aren't many who can compete at a service level.

  • Here's what's happening (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Currently akamai is configured as an open proxy. This is obviously bad (for them), since anyone can steal the service they're selling for big bucks.

    Try:
    http://a40.g.akamaitech.net/7/40/1601/1d/ i mages.sl ashdot.org/topics/topiclinux.gif

    (it works with ANY URL)

    Obviously, they noticed it, and tried to fix it. Their fix turned out to block valid customers (like Apple, as has been mentioned), so now they have rolled it back to the free-for-all setup.

    They're probably working on a better fix right now.

  • Akamais distributed DNS & content solutions (Score:5, Informative)

    by akaiONE ( 467100 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:08AM (#9237935) Homepage Journal
    Akamai may have problems from time to time over in the US, while not in Europe. The fact that Akamai uses a distributed network of both DNS and content servers helps them deliver content to most users in other regions even if some servers are down in the US.

    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)

    by Hiawatha ( 13285 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:16AM (#9238024)
    Akamai just told me it was a 90-minute glitch (between 8 and 9:30 Eastern time) caused by a software bug. The company says everything's back to normal.

  • Akamai was down from 8:00am to 9:15am (Score:3, Informative)

    by dloyer ( 547728 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:38AM (#9238239)
    We are an Akamai customer. All of our content cached through Akamai was offline for a little over an hour as measured by keynote, a site testing tool.

    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.

  • latest advisory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by john_uy ( 187459 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:42AM (#9238281)
    from contol.akamai.com

    Akamai is aware of a service interuption earlier today affecting content delivery.

    We have identified the root cause and have implemented the fix. Issues retrieving content should be decreasing or resolved. Updates will continue to be posted on the Akamai Edge Control Management Center.

    so there is something wrong with their cdn. so much for 100% availability. my guess, all the edge servers were ok but there may be a problem with their noc or software.

    :)

  • It took Microsoft down for DAYS.

    All due to a router config bug introduced by Microsoft.. So it was really Microsoft DoSing themselves via Akamai.

    And it would be unfair to blame the router config for more than a few hours of outage. The big problem was the complete and utter paralysis of management on the conference calls.

    I don't think the details of that outage have been leaked much. It was quite a hoot talking to those involved during the outage. And it wasn't hard, given the duration.

    It is my recoll

  • Explaination from Akamai (Score:5, Informative)

    by slashusrslashbin ( 641072 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @11:46AM (#9239049)
    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.

    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.
  • My theory of the apparently "random" DDoS attacks we've seen in the past years is that they are tests of new attack strategies, and possibly demonstrations for potential clients / black-mail victims, etc.

    If you can bring down Akamai, you can bring down anyone.

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