Akamai pulls Al-Jazeera web support

First came the crushing traffic and the hack attacks. Now Al-Jazeera has lost web server support for its troubled internet news efforts.

Akamai Technologies, which provided web server services to the Arabic news network, has abruptly cancelled its contract after working only briefly with the organisation. Akamai has over 13,000 servers worldwide that store data on behalf of clients.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with Al-Jazeera to understand the issues they are having distributing their websites. We ultimately decided not to continue a customer relationship with Al-Jazeera, and we are not going to be providing them our services," according to a statement released by Akamai. The company declined to elaborate on the reasons.

The news organisation has drawn criticism for its coverage of the war in Iraq. Critics have charged the agency with providing biased coverage, but others have welcomed it as an alternative source of information from the conflict.

The end of the Akamai relationship is the latest setback for Al-Jazeera's web efforts. Both the Arabic and English versions of the website were vandalised last month - visitors were greeted with an American flag and a pro-US message. The apparent hack came on the heels of severe outages caused by waves of traffic.

In addition, the news organisation's financial correspondents were shut out of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq last month shortly after the US Defense Department complained of Al-Jazeera's coverage that showed dead US soldiers and American prisoners of war held by Iraq. Two Al-Jazeera reporters were recently banned from reporting on the war by the Iraqi government, with one ordered to leave the country. The network has stopped airing reports from inside the country in protest, according to a report in The Guardian.

Al-Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar. It could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sandeep Junnarkar writes for News.com