In December 2012, Tom Leighton, who co-founded Akamai Technologies in 1998, was preparing to take over as chief executive. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he said speeding up the mobile web was his priority. The pressure on web content delivery in that period came from growing traffic, the shift to mobile devices and the threat of cyberattacks.
Cyberattacks were part of that pressure for the operators of large web infrastructure. Akamai’s own account of itself has since moved in that direction. The company says that under Leighton it has grown from a content delivery network (CDN) into a cybersecurity and cloud computing company.
A network carrying a large share of the web
Leighton said in 2012 that Akamai ran 119,000 servers and delivered between 15 and 30 percent of the web’s traffic. He described work on technologies that would prioritise different kinds of mobile web traffic. They would also use distributed devices to cache video and compress photos selectively, depending on the device in use.
The scale mattered because a CDN works by placing content on servers close to users. The Akamai platform grew out of research at MIT. It was based on methods for intelligently replicating and delivering content over a large network of distributed servers. Leighton and fellow co-founder Danny Lewin were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2017 for that work. Lewin died on 11 September 2001.
Mobile networks as the weak point
Leighton was blunt about mobile performance. He said in 2012 that mobile devices, especially on cellular networks, often performed very poorly. Download speeds from top commercial sites, he said, matched landline speeds from nine years earlier, which he compared to the Dark Ages of the internet.
He said users expected the web to behave like television, where a channel changes instantly. In his view, that expectation was what content delivery had to meet.
He also pointed to video. For big live events, such as American football or baseball games, viewers were already using Akamai without knowing it, with video streamed from a nearby Akamai server. The next generation of the technology, he said, would lean more on end-user devices to help distribute content. He also described planned data-prioritisation trials with Ericsson.
How the company’s role developed
Leighton became CEO in January 2013, according to Akamai’s investor materials. He had been chief scientist from 1998 to 2012. Akamai’s own biography of him says the company has since evolved from its CDN origins into a cybersecurity and cloud computing firm.
Akamai’s investor materials for 2022 said the company defended customers from record numbers of cyberattacks that year. The company’s description today lists CDN, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation and cloud services among its businesses. Wikipedia gives its revenue for 2025 as US$4.21 billion.
Leighton remains chief executive and co-founder, according to Akamai’s own leadership page.
The 2012 concerns about traffic volume, mobile performance and attacks all turned out to be lasting themes for the business. They shaped how Akamai described its work in the years that followed.