eWeek's Chris Gonsalves reports: "An apparent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the [domain name servers] run by Akamai Technologies Inc. slowed traffic across the Internet early Tuesday and brought the sites of the firm's major customers to a screeching halt for roughly two hours... At around 8:30 a.m. EDT, Internet performance deteriorated sharply according to officials at Keynote Systems Inc. By 9 a.m., the availability of sites in Keynote's Business 40 Internet Performance Index had dropped to 81 percent, said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology and operations for San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote, which monitors Web performance. Keynote was able to determine that the problems were limited to several large sites, including MSN.com, Microsoft.com and Yahoo.com, that outsource DNS services to Akamai. Those sites were all but inaccessible until the service was restored around 10:45 a.m., Taylor said. Keynote officials said they were still investigating the cause of the outage but that the event had all the signs of a denial-of-service attack..."