[treflop]

Then sign a contract with Akamai, who has been in business for 25 years? You outsource if you aren’t planning to do something very often.

There is no middle ground where you commit a mediocre amount of resources, end up with downtime and a mediocre experience, and then go “but we saved money.”

[freefaler]

Well, they didn't want to spend the money or more likely their own technical team/boss promised that they can do it themselves.

They indeed have a great CDN network, but it's not very good for this particular type of traffic. May be they will know/fix/buy next time...

[ksec]

When Apple moved off Akamai for their Keynote live streaming, ( I remember they also used Limestone or EdgeCast ) they had some percentage of audience using Akamai and some on their own CDN. I think it took them three years before they completely moved off Akamai. Not sure if that is still case as that was more than 10 years ago.

But like you stated, they dont want to spend money and their technical people couldn't deliver on time. This isn't a technical issue a lot of people on HN and Twitter wants to discuss about. It is a management issue.