June 16, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Akamai Technologies (akamai.com), a provider of distributed computing solutions and services, confirmed that network outages it had experienced early on Tuesday were caused by a distributed denial of service attack that affected its DNS management system, according to research firm Netcraft (netcraft.com).
The problems reportedly affected Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and anti-virus updates services from Symantec and Trend Micro, all among Akamai’s 1,100 customers.
Keynote Systems (keynote.com) confirmed the DDoS attack, which began at 5:30 a.m. pacific standard time on Tuesday and continued until 7:45 a.m. During that time, the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index dropped from its typical near 100 percent availability to 81 percent. Keynote’s index monitors the performance and availability of major Web sites on the Internet.
Keynote found that the attack impacted Akamai’s Internet naming functionality and resulted in delays in DNS name resolution, and in some cases, timed-out DNS requests. All the sites affected outsource their DNS to Akamai.
Keynote said the attack did not result in an outage in Akamai’s services, as the company did continue to serve DNS requests. However, the nature and intensity of the attack did degrade overall performance.
