Akamai Knocked Out, Major Websites Offline
from the single-point-of-failure? dept
It appears that Akamai got hit with some sort of denial of service attack this morning, which knocked their servers offline for about an hour and a half. This, in turn, took a number of major websites that use Akamai offline as well, including eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. This, of course, is going to raise a bunch of questions about Akamai being a single point of failure that can take down so many sites. Considering Akamai's entire point is that they distribute the content to many different remote servers, you would think that there would be something in place to handle this. It's also worth noting that, for all of Google's talk of managing their 100,000 or whatever servers, this report indicates that Google apparently relies pretty heavily on Akamai as well (which might throw some cold water on the idea that the two companies are competing). Either way, expect a debate to start about how to prevent such single-point-of-failure problems for so much online content.
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Other theories
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DNS trouble?
It doesn't help to have 100.000 servers pretty much situated in one place to have stable DNS service. And the distributed services of Akamai shouldn't have been so easy to shut down as it appears it was.
So to sum it up: Could it have been a DNS-type-attack? If so, maybe its time for MS, Google etc. to find someone that can actually provide a stable service. (MS fscked up their DNS service twice internally and was off the net for days because of it - if you remember. I hardly think they will go back to their own network-dns-system :-)
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