Live Sporting Events Drive Akamai Network to New Traffic Record

Akamai Technologies set a new record on Tuesday, September 12th, 2017, for the peak level of traffic delivered on its network. At more than 60 Tbps, the number eclipsed the previous record of 47 Tbps set on August 29th, 2017. The new peak was driven by several major events taking place concurrently on top of the normal day-to-day traffic that Akamai delivers.

“The Akamai cloud delivery platform is unique in its capacity to scale to such a high level, giving us an unrivaled ability to deliver multiple massive events at the same time while our customers and their end users go about their daily business without interruption,” said Michael Fay, Vice President of Media Products & Operations, Akamai. “Year after year, Akamai is setting new records of traffic volume and customer utilization of our network. Whether we’re supporting a month-long sports tournament with multiple competitions every day or one major event with a dramatic peak in traffic, Akamai has continued to be trusted when it counts the most by many of the world’s largest brands across finance, e-commerce, media & entertainment, and government organizations.”

Earlier this year, Akamai delivered the largest single live news event in the Company’s history when video streaming traffic for coverage of the Presidential Inauguration peaked at 8.7 Tbps. Last summer, Akamai delivered more video data for Rio than it did for the 2014 World Cup, making those games the largest live sporting event that Akamai has helped deliver. And in June of 2016, streaming traffic for the Portugal-France European football (soccer) tournament final peaked at 7.3 Tbps, setting a peak-traffic record for a live sports events delivered by Akamai.