Glitch Hits New Akamai Partner Portal

Due to a problem at Akamai Technologies' data center, a beta of the company's Partner Portal went offline just hours after going live.

In an e-mail to partners, the company said it brought most of its internal marketing servers offline Wednesday night to address a cooling problem. The edge control management center (ECMC) and other databases automatically switched over to backup site so customers could access them as normal. But, since the partner portal is so new, it was not already on the backup sites.

At the time, Akamai did not expect it to be back up till next week and alerted partners to that problem. Reached for comment Friday morning, Tony Amico, senior director of partner marketing, said in reality the portal was out of commission for more like 20 minutes.

Said one partner: "Since they pride themselves on being up, it seems at least ironic that this has happened."

Amico said Akamai, which works with some of the largest companies in the world, is building a partner program that would give large VARs an ongoing cut of Akamai-based services they sell. The portal provides partners with marketing materials and sales tools.

Akamai made its name with Web caching that puts information closer to its potential users and other services to make Web browsing faster and more reliable.