Parts of Akamai were down for about an hour tonight knocking several sites off the net essentially for some of us.

Here in Alameda, I was unable to get to Yahoo, Flickr, E*Trade or Apple because they all point at the local Akamai leaf node (a248.e.akamai.net) which was not responding at all. I’m sure many other sites that depend on the Akamai service to improve their performance and reliability were also affected. Looks like Akamai is not very fault tolerant.

Even Akamai’s own home page was inaccessible (as shown in the screen shot).