By Sally Watson, 8 January 2002 12:18
NEWS The 1901 census website has been shut down after BT warned that the extraordinary amount of traffic it generated was threatening to crash its network. The hugely popular website, run by the Public Record Office (PRO), has been attracting up to 30 million visitors a day since its launch last week, but its ISP, BT, admitted the site was unable to cope with such numbers. "The site was designed to accommodate one million users a day, but it was attracting around 1.2 million visitors concurrently - rising up to five times that number when the US woke up," a spokesman for BT told silicon.com. The number of hits resulted in a bottleneck on the site, leaving users unable to access pages. BT hopes the site, which was pulled on Friday, will at least be partially back online by the weekend following a number of design and technical modifications. "We're simplifying the content and doubling the site's storage capacity," said the spokesman. "We'll also set up a second site which will have a demo version and information for users who can't access the main site." The failure is embarrassing for the PRO, BT and the company behind the project QinetiQ (formerly the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) which promised online access to 32 million census names. For a small charge visitors were offered the opportunity to view a digital image of the original census return and the transcribed details for an individual, and order copies. The 1891 and 1881 censuses are being scanned in at the moment, and are expected to go live by spring 2003.
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