Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies is an American company, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that runs one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. A content delivery network keeps copies of web pages, software downloads and media objects on servers close to the people asking for them, so that a page or a file reaches a viewer faster and a surge of traffic does not overwhelm the original host. Akamai grew out of research on consistent hashing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was incorporated on August 20, 1998 by Daniel Lewin, Tom Leighton, Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan. It launched commercial service in 1999 and was listed on the NASDAQ exchange that October. Its platform now spans many thousands of servers in well over a hundred countries, and the company has widened its business into cybersecurity, protection against denial of service attacks and cloud computing, the last built partly on its 2022 purchase of the hosting provider Linode. For media history it matters as part of the plumbing that carries online video, software and news pages to large audiences.