What's static.ak.fbcdn.net that appears on the status bar of my browser everytime Facebook is loading?

Question

I find the message: "waiting for static.ak.fbcdn.net..." on the status bar of my browser everytime I load Facebook and many a times even while loading other websites.

I searched on net and found out that static.ak.fbcdn.net stands for static akamai facebook content delivery network. I reckon that static.ak.fbcdn.net is the server URL from where Facebook delivers contents to our browser. Am I right? Can anyone elaborate?

Also, why does the above mentioned message appear while loading other websites too?

Answer 1

Not sure, but this looks like serving static content from akamai on behalf of the FaceBook Content Distribution Network,

For even big webservers, many times it isn't efficient to have common items like the facebook logo or ads from facebook.com. Akamai (and others) have built efficient content caches all over the world that route to the closest to you (network wise) cache. This in theory makes things faster as you hit a local cache, and lowers the hits on facebook.com, making it faster too. The domain fbcdn.net is actually run by Akamai, on facebook's behalf.

Other websites probably have a bit of HTML/Javascript code hitting 'facebook' but in reality hits facebook and the facebook akamai servers as well.

Answer 2

Sometimes, you load a website which contains facebook component like "like box", it will proceed to get the content like facebook.com. try to find the box like this one below :)