It appears that most news sites have learned the lesson of September 11th, when many slowed down or ground to a halt under the pressure of the sudden surge in traffic.
During the past week, the volume of traffic to both news, government and US military sites has also surged. The number of visitors to BBC Online, for example, has climbed by 200 per cent since Tuesday (18 March 2003).
Mike Smartt, editor-in-chief of BBC News Online, told dotJournalism: "Our average page download time is five seconds, so we are coping well with the huge increase of visitors."
Although download times may be marginally slower, particularly at peak times such as lunch breaks, most news sites have taken precautions to ensure the problems encountered on 9/11 do not arise again.
"We have spent a considerable amount of time and money on increasing our server capacity since the September 11th terror attacks," said Mr Smartt. "We have also improved the way we serve national and international visitors to the site, so we should be able to meet any traffic demands."
Keynote Systems, a firm responsible for monitoring download times of popular web sites, has noted problems with the US Army site which was taking more than 80 seconds to download and, for almost 30 per cent of its visitors, failed to appear at all. The web site of the US Marine Corps and the UK's Home Office site for terrorism and information and advice also suffered similar problems.
Sites advising people what to do in a terrorist attack have been the hardest hit and are struggling to cope with the growing number of users.
Andy Didcott, UK boss of Keynote systems, told BBC Online: "It was clear from the outset that people would be using the internet as one of their primary information resources throughout any possible conflict.
"Unfortunately it seems that government web site managers have failed to make adequate preparation for the well-publicised surge in demand."
The Iraqi government's main web site uruklink.net now appears to be offline. There does still seem to be some internet activity from within Iraq, however. A web log by Salam Pax, apparently an Iraqi posting from within Baghdad, was still viewable and up to date as of today (21 March 2003).
Sources:
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2867855.stm
http://www.brandrepublic.com/digitalbulletin/news_story.cfm?articleID=174530&origin=DB20032003
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