The Akamai DNS Outage and the Case for CDN Redundancy (July 1-23, 2021) | Outage Deep Dive

The Internet Report

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. I’m joined today by Mike Hicks, principal solutions analyst here at ThousandEyes, to cover the outage of Akamai’s DNS service. The outage, which occurred on July 22nd around 3:38 PM UTC (8:38AM PT), struck during the course of business hours in Europe and North America, resulting in widespread impacts to applications and services hosted within Akamai servers. The outage itself was short-lived and was resolved roughly one hour after the outage began. In this episode, we examine the customer impact, the relationship between DNS and CDNs, and what enterprises should take away from the incident. We also discuss the question of when it might make sense to invest in DNS or CDN redundancy—and when it is, frankly, overkill. Watch this week’s episode to hear our take, and as always let us know on Twitter what you think.