Inaugaration brings web to its knees
The inauguration of US President Barack Obama broke records for the number of people who watched the event online. An estimated 7.7 million people watched the event online which caused many of the online video services to choke.
Keynote Systems Inc, a company that tracks internet performance said that the top 40 sites on the web registered a 60% performance hit because of the load.
In total CNN.com Live says that the site registered a total of 27 million people who watched streaming video on Tuesday, the day of the inauguration. The previous record for the site was 5.3 million which occurred on the US Election Day.
Some of the larger news sites reportedly had problems with their video streaming which lead to freezing. Facebook also reported records being broken with an average of 4,000 status updates per hour on Tuesday morning.
Michael Reed
