Obama inauguration sets Web traffic record, Akamai says

Akamai's Web traffic delivery surged to record levels during President Barack Obama's inauguration yesterday, as the company's global content delivery networks had to deliver a peak of more than 7 million simultaneous data streams.

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Akamai, a CDN provider, regularly monitors and collects data from its global network of more than 30,000 servers. At around 12:15 p.m. EST yesterday, as Obama was being sworn in as president, Akamai says that it supported more than 7 million data streams, the majority of which were live streams. For comparison's sake, on a typical day Akamai's global servers will support an average of less than 1 million simultaneous streams. In total, the company says its peak overall traffic rate surpassed 2 terabits per second at 12:15 p.m. yesterday.

"In addition to the historic nature of the Inauguration, it is now clear that this event has driven unprecedented demand from a global online audience," says Robert Hughes, Akamai's executive vice president of global sales, services and marketing. "With the inauguration occurring during work-day hours in the U.S., we witnessed record numbers of live streams served in support of many leading news businesses."

Akamai's CDN also recorded a record level of news consumption yesterday, the company says. Using its news 'Net usage index, which records online media consumption on news Web sites, Akamai reported that news sites received a record 5.4 million visitors per minute at around 11:45 a.m. EST yesterday. Typically, news sites record an average of less than 3 million visitors per minute, Akamai says.

In addition to monitoring traffic volume trends, Akamai also releases regular reports on both Internet connection speeds and on Internet attack traffic, as the company uses its global server system to measure distributed denial-of-service attacks, Web site hacking attempts and DNS hijackings for 139 countries around the world.