Hilariously, the massive media frenzy surrounding the site outage will send the site enough traffic to DDOS it, even if LulzSec never meaningfully impacted it in the first place.
Or more interestingly, if they were in the process of hacking or something and wanted the cover of a torrent of strangers trying to reach their site.
Would this effect happen so quick? I guess they do have a lot of followers, but I'd hope that even if all of them did what I did they could survive that amount of hits?
This actually serves two purposes:
1) provides some security by sufficiently isolating the actual system from public access (it can be locked down to only serve requests from the CDN)
2) Prevent the type of DDoS described in the parent comment. Akamai is designed to handle the load from things like the Grammies or Superbowl.
For example, it's been documented that the White House uses Akamai extensively.
Usually (always?), when a site is using akamai, a reverse DNS lookup for the site's IP yields some akamai domain name, rather than the original one. (This is the case for whitehouse.gov, for example.) This is /not/ the case for the CIA - they seem to do their own hosting. (root.ucia.gov and relay1.ucia.gov come up)
So, it's plausible that the site is in fact run by a very small collection of servers, and that they were sitting ducks for the next red-bull-drinking teen wanting to "hack the CIA".