US crisis: Internet downed by terrorist attack

NEWS Download time slowed significantly for major internet news sites on Tuesday as traffic soared following terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC. ISPs reported the loss of connectivity on some US routes. After 14:15(BST) the BBC site was hardly accessible with an average availability of 57.45 per cent, according to internet performance measuring company Keynote Systems. Others were also affected, with FT.com averaging 63.83 per cent and Sky.com 85.26 per cent availability. In the US, CNN reported the highest levels of traffic it has ever had, with nine million page views during the hour following the dramatic incident. That compares to an average of 11 million hits during an ordinary day. A Keynote spokeswoman told silicon.com: "These sites usually have good availability but yesterday the absolute increase in download time meant an absolute decrease in internet performance." She added that the traffic eased later in the day "about the time people were leaving their offices". The spokeswoman said that today's traffic has remained high with the BBC site being a main source of information with a download time of 30.80 seconds at 10:00 (BST). She said that at 10:30 (BST) "the site was virtually unavailable for a short time". ISP Demon released a statement saying high demand resulted in its servers suffering, adding that this is likely to be the case for some time "in light of world events." Demon said like other ISPs it "unsurprisingly" lost some connectivity on US routes. According to internet traffic monitoring company Matrix.Net, average "reachability" dropped eight per cent from 96 per cent to 88 per cent about an hour after the attacks.