TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Katrina Overwhelms Weather Web Sites

Katrina Overwhelms Weather Web Sites

Reuters News Wire (reuters@telecom-digest.org)
Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:19:40 -0500

Several U.S. weather and news Web sites were deluged by heavy traffic
as hordes of people went online seeking emergency information and news
on Hurricane Katrina, which battered the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Weather.com was largely unavailable from 6 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. EDT on
Sunday night (2200 GMT Sunday to 0115 GMT Monday), as the storm was
approaching its Louisiana landfall, according to Keynote Systems Inc.,
which monitors Internet performance.

But a spokesman at Weather.com disputed that contention. He said
availability was close to 100 percent, but the time needed to retrieve
the site's entire home page spiked to as long as 9 seconds on Monday
morning, during the height of the storm, as people came back to the
office and started checking the news.

Keynote was not immediately available for comment.

Availability of the National Weather Service Web site www.nws.noaa.gov
fell to 29 percent from 11:15 to 11:45 a.m. EDT Monday (1515 to 1545
GMT) from its usual 94 percent to 98 percent, according to Keynote.

News sites CNN.com and USAToday.com showed some degradation of
performance on Monday morning, with their home pages loading at 6
seconds and 10 seconds respectively for short periods of time, and
availability of ABCNews.com went as low as 52 percent from 2 to 2:30
p.m EDT (1800 to 1830 GMT) on Monday.

These sites usually load at 3 or 4 seconds, said Keynote. Keynote's
Business 40 Index Internet Performance Index measures the average
download time for the home pages of 40 important U.S.-based business
Web Sites.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: We also had, hee on Sunday night and
Monday morning a higher than usual amount of traffic as people looked
for whatver details they could recieve. PAT]

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