Internet attack strikes Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo

“An early morning Internet attack on Tuesday took down the Web sites of Microsoft, Google, Apple Computer and Yahoo, a tracking company said. The sites went down at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time and did not all return too normal until about 7:45 a.m. Pacific, Keynote Systems Inc. said. The outage dropped Keynote’s availability rating for the Internet, which is based on the performance of 40 large companies, to 81 percent. The figure rarely goes below 99 percent,” Antone Gonsalves reports for TechWeb News.

“It was not clear whether the Internet attack occurred against the individual web sites, or web infrastructure company Akamai, which is responsible for directing traffic to the sites… During the peak of the outage, the availability of the four companies’ web sites dropped as lows as 20 percent, Keynote said,” Gonsalves reports.

Full article here.

12 Comments

  1. Apple was an early investor in Akamai.
    In most cases, Akamai doesn’t “host” the website, it caches the site on their thousands of widely dispersed servers so the content is closer to the visitor which speeds up the delivery. At the time Apple invested, this was very important for all their movie trailers.
    A lot of high traffic sites use an Akamai like service.

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