Mideast Internet Outage Working at a technology company that doesn’t make products like Apple or web services like Monster, but instead helps those companies have faster-performing web sites is sometimes a little hard to explain. Plus most people don’t really care how the Internet really works. But, every so often something happens on the Internet that catches the media’s attention, and when we’re quick Akamai’s marketing team puts some pretty cool info online for everyone to see. Here is a time-lapse depiction of the Middle-east Internet outage that started a couple weeks ago. The thing to realize about this animation is that all the lines are Internet BGP routes that are being advertised as good to use for Internet traffic. However, the latency on those links is so bad as to make using Web applications through those links practically impossible. Yes you heard me right, the Internet does not magically fix itself in real-time.