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 not explained yet exactly what happened. The company has yet to return our calls and there is no notice on its website. A recorded message on the company's support line explained that there was an issue and that it was unsure when the service would be up again. A support representative said the company was trying to find out what had happened, all sites were back up and an announcement would be made as soon as possible.
One theory currently doing the rounds is that Akamai patched a hole discovered this week in the Linux kernel that allows for a server to be crashed with a simple 20-line piece of code. Akamai runs on Linux servers and the patch could well have crashed its servers, taking with them everyone's websites.
At the end of May, Akamai had a similar problem where a number of sites have performance problems. The company wrote it off as a bug in its content management software. That cannot be the case this time as its main hosting domain itself disappeared
