4 September 2006
News services overload
Many Australians found out about the death of Steve Irwin today around 2pm local time, about three hours after he died. Word spread quickly around my office after one person found out via a phone call.
Like very many Australians (also in offices, I guess) I jumped on the Net to find out more. After reading a quick report on ABC News Online I looked further. I was amazed that for over half an hour all of these Australian online news services were overloaded:
- ABC News Online (ABC)
- NEWS.com.au (News Ltd)
- ninemsn (Consolidated Press)
- smh.com.au (Fairfax)
ABC News Online quickly put up an apology page, followed 20 minutes or so later with a Steve Irwin news page. It had a message stating that their servers were overloaded and that other features of ABC Online would be restored soon. The other services simply didn’t return pages.
It’s quite concerning that when this story broke, not one of the major Australian online news channels could cope with the load. What would happen if some really serious news broke during the day? Something like an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel?
Or wouldn’t as many Australians clamour to find out more as quickly?
