I linked to a post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince the other day. In it, he wrote:
The super heroes of this crisis are clearly the medical professionals at the front lines saving people’s lives and the scientists searching for a cure. But the faithful sidekick that’s helping us get through this crisis — still connected to our friends, loved ones, and, for those of us fortunate enough to be able to continue work from home, our jobs — is the Internet.
The data is kind of incredible. My friend Paul sent me this from Akamai:
– Since the week of Feb 10th, Akamai has seen a 30% increase in traffic in four countries with early lock-downs (China, South Korea, Japan, Italy) vs. RoW.
– Since the week of March 9th as more countries implemented lock-downs, global traffic saw 30% Y/Y growth vs. 3% on average
– Peak traffic has more than doubled Y/Y to 167 Tbps.
– AKAM execs calling it the “greatest spike in Internet traffic the company has ever experienced”
Cloudflare is seeing similar numbers.
Big cloud providers are investing massively in their infrastructure to keep up.
I was on a Zoom yesterday and the clarity of the picture was remarkable. I thought to myself, “how are they doing this when everyone is using this service?”
And the answer, of course, is that Zoom doesn’t have to provide all of the bandwidth for their service. We all do.
Netflix doesn’t have to provide all of the bandwidth for their service. We all do.
The decentralized architecture of the internet is showing itself off right now. And it is a beautiful thing to behold.
