Several people at DerbyCon pointed to a blog post by Nick Selby, who said that Akamai’s threshold has been identified.
“The substantially much larger precedent it has set has been that Akamai – a company that has bragged that it handles about 30% of the Internet’s traffic every day; delivering more than 30 Terabits per second, and delivering the pipe through which users conduct nearly 3 trillion Internet interactions each day, enabling, it claims, more than $250 billion in annual e-commerce for its online retail customers – Akamai has now announced to the world that if your site is getting attacked at a rate of 620 gigabits per second of traffic, then you’re on your own.”
It’s possible – even likely – that those with a paid contract though Prolexic (Akamai) wouldn’t be pushed aside and ditched. Akamai had to make a hard choice, and that choice sucks. It sucks that they couldn’t protect him and keep his website online. It also sucks to see them essentially throw in the towel.