As Hurricane Katrina was about to make landfall, many major weather
monitoring sites slowed to a crawl under heavy server demands, with sporadic
outages reported.
Keynote Systems Inc–a website monitoring company–reports that Weather.com
was largely unavailable from roughly 6 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. EDT on Sunday night. It is a contention Weather.com disputes. The National Weather Service held up well, with drop offs in service speed reported on midday Monday. Major news sites such as CNN.com and USAToday.com also reported slowdowns as countless users visited in search of news.
rubber necking
It would have been nice to see what the Red Cross’s traffic was, or the indivudal states’ websites. I could be wrong but I wouldn’t think the people who are either dealing with the problem or are trying to help are going to weather.com.
Re:rubber necking
With the disaster still ongoing, and the Red Cross not able to start getting relief into the area until after the storm moved on, the weather service sites, whether government or commercial, were an important way for people outside the area to get information on conditions where friends and family are located. Or for people who’ve been traveling and are/were headed home to figure out whether “home” is close enough to the bad areas that they should arrange to stay away a little longer. Or for people just to find out what’s going on in a critically important part of this country. NOLA’s signficance is not limited to being a popular tourist destination, after all.
If you can get the information you need without making phone calls into a disaster area while the disaster is ongoing, that’s a good thing.