NASA is currently the center of ridicule on the Internet for the faulty livestream of Mars. Netizens are wondering how the space agency manages to find water on the red planet but fails at fixing buffering issues.
NASA says it is not accountable for the glitch.
"The problems were at Akamai, which provides the streaming capability we use," an agency spokesperson told Fairfax Media.
NASA first noticed the problem on the night of Sept. 28, during the super Harvest Moon eclipse. The error progressed on to Sept. 29, but the space agency has not spotted a glitch in its infrastructure.
Akamai, a leading content delivery network (CDN), is responsible for 15 to 30 percent of Internet traffic. Apple, Twitter and eBay are among the clients of the business based in the United States.
Offering a wide array of services, the CDN functions as a middleman between content creators and their viewers. Owning a huge server network around the globe, Akamai rents out space to thousands of Internet-based companies. The clients send their content to those servers, and readers can load the content faster because it's coming from a local Akamai server rather than the source, which could be in another continent.
Streaming website Ustream, which has a section for NASA, is an Akamai client. NASA's stream is also hosted on the website.
Interestingly, Facebook, another high-profile client of Akamai, underwent an outage on Sept. 29.
It remains unclear whether Akamai is responsible for the Facebook shutdown. The social media company told CNBC that the outage was caused by a "configuration error," which was the exact thing viewers were told when trying to view the NASA stream.
NASA also said that the problem with Akamai is not limited to the space agency's website.
In 2013, glitches at Akamai caused the slowdown of numerous important websites, including Instagram and Facebook.
Akamai's other client websites have been doing fine so far on Sept. 29, except for Facebook and NASA.
