Brewed Fresh Daily

Perhaps it's because I've only had one cup of coffee this morning that my thoughts on this aren't completely formed, but what I'm thinking has to do with a conversation Jack, Adele, and I were having about technology serving humanity. There's also something kickin' around my head about the lack of diversity or distribution for something so critical to the way we use the internet. Anyway, maybe I'll pick it up after another cup, or maybe one of you can comment on:

It appears that Akamai got hit with some sort of denial of service attack this morning, which knocked their servers offline for about an hour and a half. This, in turn, took a number of major websites that use Akamai offline as well, including eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. This, of course, is going to raise a bunch of questions about Akamai being a single point of failure that can take down so many sites. Considering Akamai's entire point is that they distribute the content to many different remote servers, you would think that there would be something in place to handle this. It's also worth noting that, for all of Google's talk of managing their 100,000 or whatever servers, this report indicates that Google apparently relies pretty heavily on Akamai as well (which might throw some cold water on the idea that the two companies are competing). Either way, expect a debate to start about how to prevent such single-point-of-failure problems for so much online content.