Comments on: A Couple of Large Pieces, Joined at the Hip

A Couple of Large Pieces, Joined at the Hip

bshort — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:15:56 -0800

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?

By: bshort

bshort — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:20:38 -0800

Also

By: dorian

dorian — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:24:51 -0800

glue

By: kjh

kjh — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:26:46 -0800

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.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:30:04 -0800

I haven't been able to reach apple all day.

By: sarajflemming

sarajflemming — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:34:35 -0800

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

By: thanotopsis

thanotopsis — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:53:13 -0800

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.

By: thanotopsis

thanotopsis — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:01:29 -0800

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

By: mcwetboy

mcwetboy — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:04:17 -0800

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.

By: malphigian

malphigian — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:29:50 -0800

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.

By: Bluecoat93

Bluecoat93 — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:01:00 -0800

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?

By: mrgrimm

mrgrimm — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:14:14 -0800

yep, i been having yahoo super slowness and outages all day. where's my free internet!

By: birdherder

birdherder — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 11:15:36 -0800

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.

By: tomierna

tomierna — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 11:55:16 -0800

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.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 13:08:18 -0800

It's now being called an "international attack".

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:43:14 -0800

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.

By: kjh

kjh — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:47:40 -0800

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.

By: MarkO

MarkO — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:39:02 -0800

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?

By: phyrewerx

phyrewerx — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 19:11:46 -0800

"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!

By: bshort

bshort — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 12:53:59 -0800

Slashdot has a followup.