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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

This is bad PR for Akamai and a tactical error for them to boot Krebs even if they were providing free service.

To some, the implication would will be "they couldn't handle it" so why should I trust the DDOS they are heavily promoting on their site?

At minimum they should comment on the situation, at best restore his service and learn how deal with high profile clients.

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Even if they tried to mitigate and quietly semi failed (like 30% packet loss) the PR would have been better. It could be that such attack takes down their entire network hard. Verisign said a year ago to us they could mitigate 2Tbps for comparison.

Akamai can easily mitigate this.

They just don't want to provide it for free.

And pretty much no one can afford to use their services @ 655Gb/s for that long unless they had billions of $.

Well a single 48 hr mitigation costs 12k/yr contact. Unlimited mitigations probably cost about 130k/yr. Either this negative PR is worth 12-100k in savings for them or they would drop any paying customer if the attack is over a certain threshold?

They might bill you that money, but on average it costs them less to provide that service to you, otherwise they wouldn't make any money.

Because we don't know the operating margins and the distribution of DDoS costs per customer, we can't infer how much this particular attack would cost Akamai.

According to Kerbs (https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/778398865619836928) Akamai did mitigate this DDOS, they kicked him of after the attack, not during.

Maybe because of the scale of this attack, relative to the business value Krebs provides Akamai? Shedding an attack of this magnitude (by dumping Krebs) was probably well worth the PR hit Akamai took.

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