It’s official….my good friend Science Editor at MSNBC Alan Boyle blogged today that “President Obama’s inauguration sparked significant traffic jams – not only on Washington’s streets but in cyberspace as well, according to Web performance monitors. They reported slowdowns at the Web sites run by the White House and the U.S. Senate as well as at several online news outlets.”
Boyle reported that, “The peak of more than 7 million active simultaneous streams came at 12:15 p.m. ET, just as Obama was launching into his inaugural address. That figure compares with an average of 1.3 million for the previous 24 hours.”
He went off to say, “Video wasn’t the only big draw of the day: Traffic also spiked at social networking sites such as Facebook (where users can keep their friends posted on what they’re up to) and Twitter (where 140-character “tweets” can be traded among friends). Obama took advantage of such sites during his campaign, so it’s only natural that they were in high gear today.”
Digital 3000 