Akamai Reaches New Web Traffic Milestone

Akamai said today that traffic on its global content delivery network (CDN) reached a new peak last week of 106 Tbps (terabits per second). It was the first time in the company’s 20-year history that the peak volume of data it delivered exceeded the 100 Tbps threshold.

“Delivering 106 terabits per second is roughly the same as downloading 3,300 two-hour HD movies every second, or nearly 12 million an hour,” Adam Karon, Akamai EVP-GM, media & carrier, wrote in a blog post, A Peak at the Edge: Akamai Sets New Traffic Benchmark. Karon noted that 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 Akamai intelligent edge platform.

Traffic on Akamai surpassed 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. Now, traffic on Akamai regularly peaks at more than 50 Tbps on a daily basis.