Tech investors can't catch a break. Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM) and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) suffered unrelated but nonetheless noticeable outages last night, highlighting (lowlighting?) a week that's already featured far too many crashes.
Neither incident was serious. Analyst Dan Rayburn said in a blog post that Akamai's outage lasted roughly 30 minutes on Monday and affected major clients, such as Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). A configuration change to some servers in the company's content delivery network (CDN) set off a chain reaction, prompting Akamai to revert to the original settings.
Amazon, for its part, also suffered an outage on Monday night, the cause of which wasn't immediately clear. Rayburn says the company's EC2 network -- which has failed multiple times this year -- went down for 45 minutes, affecting Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), among others.
On their own, these outages don't mean much. But taken together and combined with moves by AT&T (NYSE: T), Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to limit users' bandwidth consumption, the outages once more bring into sharp relief the need to upgrade the basic backbone of the Internet. At this pace, it won't be long before users are consuming data faster than the Web's delivery boys (CDNs, carriers, etc.) can deliver it.
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