Big Brother picture exclusive crashes paparazzi site

A paparazzi photographic agency was forced to close its website after 'absurd' demand by Big Brother fans to view its exclusive snaps.

Photographers from World Entertainment News Network (WENN) gained exclusive access to the Big Brother end-of-series party on Monday night.

Yet even before the photographs hit the tabloid on Wednesday, the agency's site was crippled as hundreds of thousands of Big Brother fans visited it to see the exclusive photos online.

For up to five hours on Tuesday, publications around the globe were unable to download the pictures as the site's photographic library went offline.

In one 40 minute period it received 273,000 hits and the site was still experiencing problems 24 hours later.

Owen Beiny, director of WENN, said: "We had to take the site offline because of the absurd amount of demand to see the big brother pictures we have up.

"Our site is a regular haunt of bloggers looking for Big Brother and other celebrity pictures, news got out down at the party that we had exclusive access and the bloggers instantly knew we had the pictures.

"As word spread, all the fan sites started linking to our site to get a look at every Tom, Dick and Harry and all the drunken celebrities.

"There was one forty minute period where we got more than 273,000 hits. It was just absurd.

"Every tabloid newspaper is carrying the pictures today, and next week all the magazines will too, but just our online business, from publishers like MSN, has been astronomical compared with what we normally do.

"We do this every day of every week, but everyone in the UK has gone bonkers for these pictures, it has been our busiest week."

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