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Akamai Having Problems?

Posted by Hemos on 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.

9 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. I thought they do file hosting also by nev4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Akamai also hosts files (images, binaries) for many major websites. Seems like they have some pretty insane bandwidth too...

    1. Re:I thought they do file hosting also by Misch · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Like Livejournal. They use Akamai for hosting userpics. This morning my buddy list was having trouble loading the images. (as they note here.)

      --

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  2. Perhaps.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Perhaps it is because of karmatic 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:Nice bit of bandwidth theft, there.
  3. Redundancy by some1somewhere · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Their system is supposed to be distributed in such a way that any major outage in a section of the internet would not affect their overall ability to deliver the content, so presuambly any outage an ISP would not hit their too hard.

    BTW something interesting:
    http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/w ww.peacefire.o rg/bypass/Proxy/akamai.html

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  4. Report from Akamai by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. DNS flaky for the last 90 days by sphealey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  6. What about Bittorrent? by KhalidBoussouara · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. I've noted a big problem... by Eggplant62 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    .. 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.

  8. I'd say it's near a natural monopoly... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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

    --
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