Sites see massive demand for online news
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President Barack Obama's inauguration was a record-setting occasion for the Internet, as news websites responded to massive demand for online coverage of the historic day.
"This is an immense event, and obviously it proved to be an event that millions upon millions of people around the world logged on to," said Jeff Young, a spokesman for Internet content delivery company
Akamai delivers Internet content to major sites, including those of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The company said its sites reached peak traffic of 5.4 million visitors per minute during the inauguration, the fifth-heaviest volume ever experienced by Akamai.
Traffic was even heavier for sites that streamed live video of the event. Akamai delivered more than 7 million simultaneous video streams during Obama's speech.
"This is the largest live streaming event we've ever carried on our network," Young said.
The CNN.com news site also shattered its previous record for delivery of streaming video. CNN.com delivered 21.3 million live video streams of Obama's inauguration between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. yesterday. The previous record was 5.3 million streams over 24 hours, set on Election Day in 2008, when Obama won the presidency. Traffic was so heavy that some visitors were routed to an online "waiting room" until additional capacity was available. CNN also recorded 136 million visitors to its website.
CNN.com collaborated with the popular social networking site Facebook to enable viewers to post comments about its video on their Facebook pages. A Facebook spokeswoman said that 600,000 users published Facebook comments during Obama's inauguration, with as many as 4,000 comments per minute during the president's speech.
News site MSNBC.com said that as of 1 p.m., it had delivered 14 million video streams and 80 million Web page views. A spokeswoman said that some users had difficulty in accessing video on the site, but that the problems were quickly resolved. FoxNews.com said yesterday afternoon that it was on track to deliver 5 million video streams, the highest rate in the site's history.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
