Case Study: Met Office achieves 500% traffic surge handling and improved global performance without infrastructure build-out with Akamai Technologies' Dynamic Site Accelerator

The Met Office Handles 500% Traffic Increase And Improves Global Performance Without Infrastructure Build Out

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service serving the public, government and businesses, operates a high-traffic, highly interactive website that averages 50 million visits per month. During severe weather events the site experienced unpredictable surges that degraded performance and risked denying access to critical forecasts; the organisation needed scalable capacity, consistent global performance and a way to avoid continual infrastructure build-outs.

By deploying Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator, the Met Office gained on-demand capacity and global distribution that preserved availability during peak storms. The CDN delivered over 6,500 requests/sec at peak, offloaded about 95% of bandwidth, handled a 500% traffic spike without new data-center investment, supported larger international audiences (e.g., +45% during the Iceland eruption) and enabled confident future growth.

Met Office

Pam Dickinson

IT Channels Manager, Met Office