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Akamai runs a global network of servers that helps websites and apps load fast and stay safe from attacks.
Akamai is the delivery system for the internet. When you stream a video, shop online, or log into a bank app, the data often travels through Akamai's servers first, placed physically close to you so the page loads quickly. Companies pay Akamai to make their websites feel fast and to block hackers and bot attacks before they reach the company's own computers.
The business has two main parts. The delivery side, called content delivery, caches copies of websites and media on servers scattered around the world so a user in Tokyo doesn't have to wait for data from a server in Virginia. The security side sells protection: it filters out junk traffic, stops denial-of-service attacks meant to knock a site offline, and guards against fraud and bots. Customers choose Akamai because building this kind of global network yourself is expensive, and because the company has been doing it since the early days of the web. Akamai's own origin story is unusually academic. It grew out of a challenge posed at MIT in the 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, who worried about a problem called "flash crowds" — too many people hitting one page at once. The founders' answer was to spread content across many servers, and that idea became the foundation of the company, which went public in 1999.
The cloud giant Amazon and Cloudflare are the biggest threats, since both sell similar delivery and security services, often at aggressive prices. Akamai's counter is scale and trust: it runs one of the largest distributed networks on the planet and counts many of the world's biggest banks, media companies, and retailers as customers. It has also been pushing into cloud computing itself, buying the cloud firm Linode in 2022 to sell rented computing power to businesses that want an alternative to the giants. More recently, the company has leaned hard into security, including a deal to buy CyberArk, as it tries to make protection the bigger half of the business while its older delivery revenue grows more slowly.
Saved answer · last researched 23 Oct 2026