Akamai Technologies, Inc - USA

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an Internet content delivery network headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Akamai's network is one of the world's largest distributed-computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 20 percent of all web traffic.

The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents space on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations close to the user. When a user navigates to a website, such as healthcare.gov, Bing, Facebook, or Twitter, their browser is redirected to one of Akamai's copies of this website, almost entirely invisible to the vast majority of its users. However, since SSL is designed to highlight hidden intermediaries, Akamai has struggled to make secure web pages work with their service, and an attempt to connect to a popular website over HTTPS will often reveal Akamai.

Akamai provides a service to companies that have content on the Internet (Akamai's customers), to deliver this content to users browsing the Web and downloading content. Akamai does this by transparently mirroring content-sometimes all site content including HTML, CSS, and software downloads, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video-from customer servers. Though the domain name (but not subdomain) remains the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server or to another user's machine that Akamai is used as a server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.