Coronavirus is helping to drive twice as much traffic as last year to Akamai's networks, but Akamai's CEO says its services are 'running normally'
- Akamai's web traffic monitor that shows its networks are seeing 50% more web traffic than average.
- Akamai CEO Tom Leighton told Business Insider that the company has even seen double the web traffic so far in 2020 compared with Q1 2019. It partly has to do with an increased reliance on the internet amid coronavirus concerns, as people are encouraged to employ "social distancing" to stem the spread of the virus.
- Despite the extra web traffic, Akamai's CEO Tom Leighton told Business Insider that its systems are running normally.
- If internet users were to experience any interruption, it would be slower internet in general, but nothing of major concern.
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Akamai - the major content-delivery, cloud, and cybersecurity service provider that's responsible for a good chunk of "the internet" - is currently experiencing a more than 50% increase in traffic than the average day, as reported by Akamai's real-time web monitor.
That 50% increase is on the low side. In an interview with Business Insider - hosted over the internet, using Akamai's services, of course - Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said the company's peak traffic load during the first quarter of 2020 is double compared with the same time last year.
While Leighton noted that web traffic naturally grows year-over-year, the coronavirus pandemic is playing a role in this recent increase of web traffic. "I think we'll see more acceleration due to the fact that you have so many more people working from home and you have, kids out of school and spending more time at home," Leighton told Business Insider.
Thankfully, for anyone concerned about the impact that the coronavirus may have on the internet and its ability to support our increased reliance on the web, Leighton said he isn't concerned at all. Indeed, internet users aren't likely to experience much of a difference, at least those using the portion of the internet that Akamai delivers.
And it's more likely than not that the average internet user ends up on a company's site or service that uses Akamai. That portion of the internet that Akamai serves includes internet traffic from more than 2 dozen of the biggest banks in the US, almost all the major commerce sites, as well as big media companies, which use Akamai for things like live event streaming, over-the-top video streaming, online gaming and streaming, and software downloads.
Should there be any impact from any overloading on Akamai's services, you might see lower quality videos, videos buffering, or longer download times.
It's still too early to make an absolute and final call on how Akamai's performance - and our access to the internet at large - will be affected in the long run. For now, the worst that can happen to the internet is that "it just wouldn't perform as well," Leighton said. And we're not there yet.
"Our services are running normally," Leighton said.