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London attack: Record numbers visit UK websites
Huge spike in traffic following the blasts...

By Reuters

Published: Friday 08 July 2005

Record numbers of visitors deluged British websites on Thursday as people around the world sought information from news organisations about the blasts that rocked London's public transport network.

News sites operated by public broadcaster BBC, satellite TV provider BSkyB and the Financial Times business newspaper suffered delays on their homepages on Thursday morning in London because of the traffic, according to a company that monitors web traffic.

Roopak Patel, an analyst at Keynote Systems, said: "There was a significant amount of turbulence in terms of performance."

The BBC expects that by the end of Thursday it will have had the most visitors in a single day in the history of its news website, though it won't have official data until Friday.

A BBC spokeswoman said: "We have had a huge surge in people using the site today. We are pretty certain this is going to be our busiest ever day."

The BBC website experienced some delays, she said, but handled the volume well.

"We haven't had any major problems. We've had consistency in service. There may have been a little slowdown earlier," said added.

Among the other popular UK sites were FT.com, Reuters.com and Sky News.

By 15:15(BST) - 07:15(PDT) - Sky said it had registered 1.7 million unique visitors for the day.

A Sky spokeswoman said: "That's the equivalent of a month's traffic on the site."

"We had 25 million page impressions, and the site was very robust and withstood the extra traffic," she added.

Keynote's index of some 40 UK business websites showed a fourfold increase in delays, with the wait time for web pages to load spiking up to an average of eight seconds from the normal average of two seconds, Keynote said.

Keynote Systems' Patel said: "Users who were trying to access the information were seeing higher than normal delays, and at the same time, some people weren't able to get through to some sites."

Keynote said that the news websites had begun to approach more normal levels of usage later in the day, and that there hadn't been major delays seen yet at US news websites.

A blog on The Guardian newspaper website attracted heavy usage and was difficult to access at times. The site had eyewitness accounts, reports from other organisations and links to photographs.

Following the 9/11 airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, many news websites were so overwhelmed with visitors that they could not be accessed, forcing on-the-fly redesigns to simplify homepages with fewer photographs and less advertising.