News Sites Struggle With Record Inauguration Traffic

Written by Steve Donohue

Tuesday, January 20. 2009 at 04:40 PM EST 2 comments

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News outlets covering President Barack Obama’s inauguration today posted record traffic numbers and, at times, struggled to meet demand from Web surfers.

CNN.com set new traffic records for its coverage of the inauguration, generating 18.8 million live video streams between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. EST.

The all-news network was one of many news outlets that struggled to meet demand from viewers hoping to watch the inauguration online. Some CNN.com users were greeted Tuesday afternoon with a message that read, “Congratulations, you made it. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.”

Increased traffic also caused some outages at CBSNews.com. “We here at CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties due to an unusually high number of requests (although our video streams are working again),” the network said in a message to Web surfers.

CNN rival MSNBC.com says it delivered more than 14 million streams from its coverage of the inauguration by 1 p.m. EST, including 9 million live video streams and 5 million streams from on-demand content.

Akamai Technologies Inc., which provides streaming video services for NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and several other news outlets, said it delivered a peak of more than 7 million active simultaneous streams at approximately 12:15 p.m. EST, just as President Obama was being sworn in. Total traffic on the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second at 12:15 p.m., the company added.