Slashdot Mirror
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.
Perhaps this is related to the SBC strike?
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).
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
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.