A Couple of Large Pieces, Joined at the Hip
June 15, 2004 8:15 AM   Subscribe

Akamai is having some issues. It turns out a lot of really large companies use Akamai as their DNS host and apparently most of their DNS servers are no longer responding. And it's not like this is the first time. Geeks are in a tizzy. Whither the decentralized network?
posted by bshort (19 comments total)
 
Also
posted by bshort at 8:20 AM on June 15, 2004


glue
posted by dorian at 8:24 AM on June 15, 2004


Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple

I can reach those sites just fine. If the "geeks are in a tizzy" it must just be their usual overreaction.
posted by kjh at 8:26 AM on June 15, 2004


I haven't been able to reach apple all day.
posted by dabitch at 8:30 AM on June 15, 2004


I peeked at the source for Apple's homepage, it looks like they're serving their images through http://images.apple.com, now. Hee.
posted by sarajflemming at 8:34 AM on June 15, 2004


Took me 3 hours this morning to finally figure out that this wasn't my problem. Firewall logs, DNS log browsing -- fun fun fun.

All the while, of course, the office is emailing me with "I can't get to Yahoo!" or "I can't get to Google!"

I really should just read Slashdot or Metafilter first before diagnosing any network problem. Would have saved me a whole lot of time today. /sigh.
posted by thanotopsis at 8:53 AM on June 15, 2004


I peeked at the source for Apple's homepage, it looks like they're serving their images through http://images.apple.com, now. Hee.

Actually, much like images.amazon.com, images.apple.com is a front for an Akami server. If you do a DNS lookup for images.apple.com, you get:

a932.g.akamai.net
posted by thanotopsis at 9:01 AM on June 15, 2004


I was wondering why I couldn't log into my Gmail account or access the Apple site, while at the same time I could reach my own sites.
posted by mcwetboy at 9:04 AM on June 15, 2004


I can reach those sites just fine. If the "geeks are in a tizzy" it must just be their usual overreaction.

Yeah, I mean, if kjh can get to the sites, why should anyone worry? The important folks still have access! Heh.

Seriously though, It might not be happening for you because you have cached DNS results. Or the problem was intermittent and you got lucky.

I agree that there is a tendency for slashdot types to overreact, but this is a pretty big deal. So many major sites tied to one service is sort of antithetical to the decentralized design of the net.
posted by malphigian at 9:29 AM on June 15, 2004


I can reach those sites just fine. If the "geeks are in a tizzy" it must just be their usual overreaction.

Actually, what happened was that several high-profile sites (Google, Yahoo) temporarily removed Akamai from the mix and started hosting their own DNS (which worked around the problems with akadns.net). At least for a while, this was causing www.yahoo.com to work, but subdomains like mail.yahoo.com to have issues.

Perhaps the geeks are in a tizzy because they know more than you?
posted by Bluecoat93 at 10:01 AM on June 15, 2004


yep, i been having yahoo super slowness and outages all day. where's my free internet!
posted by mrgrimm at 10:14 AM on June 15, 2004


iTunes music store [US] isn't loading. After trying forever an error message pops up saying maybe it is busy. Not sure if this is the Akamai thing or issues with the Euro iTunes launch. Either way I've managed to forget the song I was going to get.
posted by birdherder at 11:15 AM on June 15, 2004


This was all over NANOG this morning, as of around 9am EST.

A bit later, maybe 10am EST, Apple replaced their Akamai DNS entries with their own DNS servers.

Other companies did the same. It looks as though everyone is back on Akamai though.
posted by tomierna at 11:55 AM on June 15, 2004


It's now being called an "international attack".
posted by tommasz at 1:08 PM on June 15, 2004


Shares of Akamai were up 71 cents, to $15.62, in Tuesday trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

lol.. suddenly the world wakes up, Akamai is an important player if it can cause such a big outage, buy buy.
posted by stbalbach at 2:43 PM on June 15, 2004


I agree that there is a tendency for slashdot types to overreact, but this is a pretty big deal. So many major sites tied to one service is sort of antithetical to the decentralized design of the net.

Says who? By all accounts, whether by switching to backup DNS servers or proaction by Akami, the outage was relatively short-lived, and I would hardly call fedex.com and xerox.com backbones of the Internet as we know it. While I feel for people like thanotopsis who had to endure the most annoying consequences of this incident, I think that as news goes it's small potatoes, and as front-page material goes it's better left to slashdot.
posted by kjh at 3:47 PM on June 15, 2004


Why would anyone want to DDoS attack Akami? All they do is severely increase the speed of downloading rich content web sites, among other things. Why not whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.com or aljazeera?
What did Akami ever do to you?
posted by MarkO at 6:39 PM on June 15, 2004


"Checking all my favorite sites this morning, I saw that about half a dozen seem to be offline."

And then later lists Microsoft? Surely the poster is going to get called out in the dot!
posted by phyrewerx at 7:11 PM on June 15, 2004


Slashdot has a followup.
posted by bshort at 12:53 PM on July 7, 2004


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