Akamai smashes company record, tops 100 Tbps

Traffic on Akamai’s intelligent edge platform reached 106 Tbps last week, surpassing the 100 Tbps mark for the first time in the company’s 20-year history.

This is “roughly the same as downloading 3,300 two-hour HD movies every second, or nearly 12 million an hour,” Akamai’s Executive Vice President and General Manager, Media and Carrier, Adam Karon, wrote in a blog post.

The traffic peak was largely driven by a popular video game update along with “the staggering amount of other content and data delivered at the same time” across the platform, Karon said.

Akamai’s traffic exceeded 1 Tbps for the first time in 2008 and just late last year the company announced it eclipsed 70 Tbps, thanks to a combination of live sports events, gaming releases and major software updates along with elevated e-commerce activity. Akamai said the platform now reaches daily peaks of 50 Tbps.

“What makes Akamai unique is the ability of our edge platform to support individual streaming events at tremendous scale — whether it’s a major sports tournament viewed by millions, game downloads or the final episode of a popular series — while simultaneously delivering the same high-quality performance for thousands of other customers conducting business on our network,” Karon wrote.

“We take enormous pride in delivering some of the largest online events the world has seen. But what’s truly impressive has been our ability to do this without impacting the performance we provided for other customers.”

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