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Akamai Technologies said today it saw a record spike in online traffic during the Inauguration of President Barack Obama.

As the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming over the Akamai network, the company reported it reached a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority live streams) at around 12:15 p.m. today.

Total traffic on the network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second and the company also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time.

"In addition to the historic nature of the Inauguration, it is now clear that this event has driven unprecedented demand from a global online audience," said Robert Hughes, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services, and Marketing at Akamai.

"With the Inauguration occurring during work-day hours in the U.S., we witnessed record numbers of live streams served in support of many leading news businesses. While this event was supported flawlessly for our broadcast customers, it is also important to point out that Akamai continued to deliver perfect quality of service for the remainder of our 2,800 enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world."

Akamai said its Net Usage Index for News also saw a significant traffic peak today. The index indicated that at about 11:45 a.m. there were over 5.4 million visitors per minute looking for news online.