[Infowarrior] - Major Internet hiccups yesterday

[Richard Forno]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/akamai_goes_postal/
Akamai goes postal, kills Microsoft, Symantec, Google, Apple, Lycos...
By Kieren McCarthy
Published Tuesday 15th June 2004 15:26 GMT

A major cock-up at Akamai has seen the world's biggest websites vanish from
view for two hours today.

>From around 1.30pm, the Internet domain that Akamai uses to host content -
akadns.net - disappeared and only reappeared at 3.30pm. Because a huge
number of websites run through the Akamai site - including the world's four
biggest, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, Google.com and Microsoft.com - when Akamai went
down, so did they.

Akamai is the world's biggest content hoster, claiming to carry 15 per cent
of the Net's traffic. Companies pay it to seamlessly host their website
content so files that appear to be at www.microsoft.com are, in reality,
hosted at www.microsoft.akamai.net.

Ironically, one of Akamai's main selling pitches for its technology is that
it prevents there from being a single point of failure. Outsourcing content
to a specialist like Akamai enables companies to concentrate on content
rather than have to install their own infrastructure to deal with such
things as denial-of-service attacks. But the concept appears to be rather
like the Titanic - founded on the belief that Akamai is unsinkable.

Akamai has got back to us to explain that the problem stemmed from what a
spokesman called a "large scale international attack on the Internet's
infrastructure". Akamai said the attack was primarily aimed at the large
search engines - of which it runs the three largest, Yahoo!, Google and
Lycos - which meant that people were unable to access the sites.

The spokesman denied however that it was an outage and said that the Akamai
name service continued to function throughout the attack which ended around
two hours later.

The company is still analysing the attack and the spokesman told us it could
not yet conclude whether it was directed solely at Akamai. ®