Andrea Orr
PALO ALTO: It was the first US presidential election since the Internet
became a mainstream source of breaking news, but many people seeking the latest
results in the nail-biting contest had more luck with an old-fashioned source of
information - television.
Election Day 2000 started with the Web site for the Republican National
Committee (http://www.rnc.org) featuring a
tirade against the party's presidential contender George W Bush, thanks to a
hacker, apparently a Democrat, who had broken in. The day drew to a close with
voters being blocked from accessing some of the most popular news destinations.
"You're seeing this page because MSNBC is experiencing high site
traffic," was the message that greeted many visitors to (http://www.MSNBC.com)
late in the day, as volumes of people logged on to see the latest tally.
MSNBC, operated jointly by Microsoft Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC
television network, had promised full election news and more analyses than it
could provide on its affiliate television stations. But, it showed an uneven
performance for much of the evening.
People also complained about delays getting onto other popular news sites
like (http://www.CNN.com), (http://www.ABCNews.com)
and various political sites like (http://www.voter.com),
and said that some of the big Internet portals were slower than usual.
"It has been worse than I anticipated," said Dan Todd, spokesman
for Keynote Systems Inc. , which monitors Web site performance and found a long
list of sites from (http://www.votenader.com)
to (http://www.USAToday.com) that were
taking over 20 seconds to update Web pages at peak usage times.
"There was clearly some degradation in the site performances," said
Todd. "They are certainly not meeting all their visitor expectations."
CNN Interactive President Scott Woelfel said CNN's election site was busy,
but had suffered no outages. He said the site was serving some 10 million pages
per hour, far eclipsing its earlier record.
"We've had extremely heavy traffic, as we anticipated. It is probably a
little bit higher than we thought it would be but under what we planned
for," Woelfel said. "We've seen no outages, and it's been going
smoothly."
Web sites have frequently shown strain as key events from the death of
Princess Diana to the virtual Victoria's Secret fashion show drew unusually
large audiences. ABCNews.com said it broke its prior single-day site traffic
record by midday on Tuesday. (The old record had been set in 1998 when it posted
the Starr Report detailing President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky).
But many Internet users said they were surprised the Web continued to be so
unreliable after years of investment in the best technology.
Those who were able to log on without any onerous delays, however, said they
could not have been more pleased with all the information available, and with
some of the social aspects of the Net.
One investment banker who joined colleagues after a conference in San Diego
to follow the late-breaking results online, described 25 people sitting around a
computer screen, and said it felt a little bit like the old days of radio.
"We've had a really engaged discussion in front of the machine because
we're not listening to the chattering of the talking heads on television,"
he said.
(C) Reuters Limited 2000.