Repeating the pattern seen after the September 11 attacks in 2001, sites providing news coverage of the war were hit hardest. The major US news sites took a performance hit Wednesday night shortly after the news of the US missile attack on Baghdad broke, and UK sites had similar problems Thursday morning local time, according to web performance measurement firm Keynote Systems Inc.
Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news organization was having very serious performance problems as the Arab world woke into war. The site was unavailable half the time and taking over 240 seconds to load, but this improved dramatically during the day, Keynote said. The US’s army.mil, usmc.mil and others have been suffering capacity problems all week.
At least one content filtering firm warned of the potential of corporate networks being clogged as users tuned into streaming audio and video of war coverage from the major TV networks. 8e6 Technologies Inc released a warning Monday that a possible war could lead to productivity slowdown in the workplace.
Indeed, RealNetworks Inc’s Real Broadcast Network reported that it expected to serve between three and four million streams by the end of last week, up to three times its regular load. RBN serves audio and video streams for major US TV stations including ABCNews.com, NPR, CBS and CSPAN
Separate from the traffic issue, anti-virus firms warned of a low-risk Outlook worm called Ganda, crudely socially engineered to provoke war-curious users to launch it by masquerading as a secret documents or anti-Bush satire. The same trick was employed to little effect in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack.
Source: Computerwire
