Akamai Confirms Attack On Sites But Says Portrayal Is Inaccurate

Akamai Technologies Inc. acknowledged Wednesday that a "sophisticated, large-scale" distributed denial-of-service attack occurred that targeted several of the distributed computing service provider's customers.

However, Akamai says the impact of the attack on specific Web sites has been "inaccurately portrayed." The company also wrote in a statement that the attack impacted the domain name service requests for roughly 4% of Akamai's customer based, but only 2% of its customers had any noticeable impact, and just 1% of its customers experienced "significant impact" of Web-site performance, which the company estimates affected 20% of Web surfers who visited those sites.

Web performance monitoring company Keynote Systems Inc. reported on Tuesday that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo suffered performance degradation which began around 8:30 a.m. EDT and continued through 10:45 a.m. EDT.

Keynote reported that the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index fell from its normal near-100% availability to 81% availability during the attack. Keynote said this was the result of the unavailability of several major Web sites.

A Microsoft spokesman says his company hasn't received reports from customers related to any Web-site outage.

An Akamai spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

"Akamai regrets any inconvenience that the affected customers may have experienced, and continues to take steps to protect customers and itself against the effects of future attacks," the company's statement says, which adds that the company is cooperating with federal law-enforcement officials investigating the attack.