Why do I have Akamai.net traffic on my computers?

[BobsArmory]

So I have been looking at the traffic that goes thru my router (ASUS RT-AC5300) and I keep seeing Akamai.net as something that is using bandwidth. Looking at the history on the computers, no one has visited this site? My Computer seems to use the most bandwidth to Akamai.net but other devices seem to connect as well.

I have run a scan using both Bitdefender Total Protection and Malwarebytes, nothing pops up.

Some days I'll see 5 Megs of data passed up and down with Akamai.net other days I might see a few hundred megs of data.

What gives?

 

[NYSteve]

Akamai is a ad network. Prob video ads through sites you are visiting.

 

[danez_yoda]

see if you can block it in the router.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Akamai is a content delivery network used by a lot of large companies and their websites. If you watch videos online, some of them are served by Akamai.

 

[SubieRubyRoo]

Install and use Adblock Plus and see if that traffic goes down. Privacy Badger is another one. I use them both.

 

[Omahaug]

Akamai is a CDN provider, I know because I work in tech and my company uses it for our hosting as do thousands of others. Anyone who is hosting a website or web app is likely using a CDN.

A CDN in extremely simplified layman terms, stores the parts of websites in multiple areas geographically. A perfect analogy is to think of it like an auto parts retailer having warehouses in multiple states of a country instead of just one state. When a customer makes an order, they ship from the closest warehouse. It's literally a "Content Delivery Network" or a network of servers that Akamai maintains that hold content to deliver to the closest user that requests them.

When you visit a website, just loading the website could result in dozens of requests going out to a CDN to load the images, the Javascript files and ads hosted in iframes too. When you request anything on the web, with or without a browser, it has to go to a web server to handle that request. For its customers Akamai handles serving up the content from the closest CDN for any given request made to a web server for content hosted on the CDN.

If CDNs didn't exist, you'd either do that splitting up of content across multiple areas yourself as a server host, or your server would be serving up resources from one location in the world to users from potentially any location in the world. That's a crappy experience for your users. If my server was only hosted in the UK and most of my visitors are making requests from across the pond.

It's normal and it's a good thing that most traffic goes to a CDN, otherwise things would be much slower.

 

[BigD1]

Check and see if you have Akamai Netsession installed.

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/media-delivery/netsession-interface-faq.jsp

 

[BobsArmory]

Not installed. And thanks NoNameJoe. Makes sense.

Originally Posted by BigD1
Check and see if you have Akamai Netsession installed.

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/media-delivery/netsession-interface-faq.jsp

 

[rubberchicken]

Originally Posted by NYSteve
Akamai is a ad network. Prob video ads through sites you are visiting.


Akamai is not an ad network- Akamai is a CDN- content delivery network. CDN's essentially cache data at local data centers so that your website does not have to send the entire webpage. It makes surfing the net much faster.
Run your normal AV or adware tools just to be sure, but Akamai is typically safe and legit.

 

[spackard]

If you get Microsoft patches, they are hosted on akamai.

 

[bobdoo]

adblock partners with *some* advertisers. uBlock Origin is the current favorite.

 

[rubberchicken]

NoNameJoe gave a very good explanation on Akamai. However they are a large company and offer a lot of other services besides pure CDN, but they are best known for CDN.

 

[Subdued]

Akamai also owns Prolexic, which is a DDoS mitigation service.