Internet news traffic reached record levels on Tuesday immediately following attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Extensive retrieval times on news sites forced online publishers to cut back on graphics and interactive features within their sites but this was not enough to stop many servers grinding to a halt.
CNN.com an affiliated company of AOL Time Warner’s 24 hour news channel, reported record traffic, hitting 9 million page views an hour compared to ordinary volume of 11 million page views per day.
“This is the largest amount of traffic we’ve ever had,” said CNN.com spokeswoman Edna Johnson. We tripled our server capacity internally,” she said, “We’ve had calls from all over the world from outlets offering us bandwidth, because they knew we were at maximum capacity.”
The internet struggled to cope with demand for access as millions of users logged on to visit news sites following the terrorist attacks. The BBC, Reuters, Sky, CNN and ITN news sites were all unavailable as of 4pm yesterday and according to press reports 80% of the worldwide web was suspended due to over demand.
