Akamai answered internet traffic jams with an algorithm instead of bigger servers

In 1995, Tim Berners-Lee challenged MIT researchers to solve a problem the web's own success was creating: whenever a site got popular fast — breaking news, a product launch, a viral link — the single server or server farm hosting it would buckle under the surge, an effect the industry called a flash crowd. The standard fix was to keep buying bigger, more central infrastructure, but that only raised the ceiling; it didn't change the fact that every request for a given page still funneled through the same physical location; and it did nothing for the network congestion on the way there.

Tom Leighton, an MIT applied-math professor working on parallel algorithms and network theory, took up the problem with graduate student Danny Lewin. Their question wasn't how to make the origin server bigger, but whether the request needed to reach the origin server at all — whether the content could instead be found near whoever was asking for it, chosen dynamically by a formula rather than by a fixed, pre-assigned location.

Replicated content across thousands of servers and routed each request to the nearest, least congested copy in real time, turning a chokepoint into a routing problem.

Replicating content across thousands of servers removes the single chokepoint that flash crowds overwhelm.

Consistent hashing lets the system reassign requests around failed or overloaded servers in real time.

Routing each request to the nearest fast copy reduces network congestion and latency.

Cost scales with aggregate network capacity, not worst-case peak at one location.

When a single point is overwhelmed, don't enlarge it—ask if the request must reach it at all, and distribute work to many smaller locations near demand, using a routing formula to pick the fastest.

The network absorbed billions of daily requests by rerouting around congestion; Akamai's 1999 IPO opened at $26, closing near $145 that day. Akamai's edge-caching, distributed-routing model set the pattern every major CDN since — Cloudflare, Fastly, Amazon CloudFront — has followed, and it underlies the assumption, now taken for granted, that a website can serve a global audience without a single point of failure at its core.