Rush for latest news swamps websites

By MICHAEL FOREMAN, CHRIS BARTON and AGENCIES

International news websites were swamped by a surge in visitors after yesterday's terrorist attacks.

But although internet traffic slowed and major news websites were jammed, the net proved its worth as a communications facilitator in a time of crisis.

To cope with the flood of visitors, staff at MSNBC.com removed graphics from the site to give users faster access to the news.

CNN.com also streamlined its site, temporarily removing video, ads and non-breaking news.

Reaching the ABC News site was difficult until ABC took measures, including borrowing server capacity from sister company ESPN.com.

Reports from the United States suggest thousands of people have used the net to send messages of sympathy and condolence by e-mail, or simply to tell loved ones that they were safe.

American internet service provider Prodigy was the first of several organisations which set up websites to allow people who were close to the attacks to register that they were safe at its "I'm OK" online message centre.

Berkeley graduate students also established a site. Their World Trade Center Survivor database had collected 1260 names by yesterday afternoon. Most people were recorded as being safe, but some were listed as injured, critical or missing.

United States Attorney-General John Ashcroft asked yesterday that anyone with information about the terrorist attacks contact the FBI via a website - although that site (www.ifccfbi.gov) was jammed within seconds of Ashcroft's announcement.

Local net commentator Bruce Simpson, owner of the internet news website Aardvark, said he turned to the internet after watching a second airliner smash into the World Trade Center on television soon after 1 am.

But his efforts to log in to the websites of CNN, Yahoo, FoxNews and ABCNews were unsuccessful.

"Most of the mainstream news sites were inaccessible, and feedback I've had from people in the United States said the same thing was happening there."

News of the attacks soon dominated other topics on electronic discussion bulletin boards, especially Usenet newsgroups.

The Herald website began running news of the disaster from 1.30 am and by 6 pm yesterday had placed 27 stories online.

It also had a surge in traffic, but the site was coping with the increased demand.

Mark Ottaway, general manager of nzherald.co.nz, said the site received three to four times its normal number of visitors.

As the news broke in New Zealand, traffic climbed steeply from 6.30 until 8.00 am peaking at 1.8 to 2 gigabytes an hour at around mid-day, levels which were maintained into the afternoon.

"Our systems have been designed to cope with large spikes in usage and are very capable of handling this sort of increase in traffic," said Patrick van Rinsvelt, nzherald.co.nz technical manager.

Matt Bostwick, spokesman for internet service provider Xtra said his company received many calls from people who complained they were unable to watch video of the attacks on international websites.

"There has been little we can do about international congestion, all we can do is to advise them to access local sites wherever possible."

Mr Bostwick said the number of page views to Xtra's website was about 40 per cent above average levels and had peaked between 10 and 11 am.

He said an overnight outage of Xtra's Usenet newsgroup server was unrelated to events in the US and the company's e-mail servers had held up so far despite "record levels" of traffic.

Nielsen Netratings Pacific region managing director Brian Milnes said New Zealand web surfers flocked to US news sites. New Zealand at-home audiences to the US news site cnn.com were 371 per cent higher than the daily site average for August.

In Australia, cnn.com's home based audience was 477 per cent higher.

E-mail proved crucial, meanwhile, for many people seeking to reach families and friends in the chaos and uncertainty that followed yesterday's destruction.

While telephone calls produced busy signals, quick e-mail messages confirmed that loved ones were alive.

Gretchen Heefner of San Francisco quickly went online to check on several close friends in Manhattan.

"Send word when you can," she wrote. "I could not reach anyone on their home phone, cellphone or work phone from my home phone or cell phone, and so e-mail was the best way," she said.

"Fortunately, people were in their offices and have fast connections and could get their e-mail right away."

Rob Batchelder, an internet infrastructure specialist at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut, recalled how he instantly turned to the web as the television brought the first news of something terribly wrong.

His wife, Rosemary, was staying in a hotel room on the 27th floor of New York's Rockefeller Centre and he was concerned. He grabbed the phone to call her and got a wailing beeper and a recorded voice saying all phones were out. His mobile phone was silent as well.

He then furiously typed in the addresses of web news site after web news site with very little luck. Most didn't come on at all; the others took forever to load.

So Mr Batchelder fired off an ordinary e-mail and got a most welcome reply from Rosemary. She was shaken. Looking out of her window she had witnessed the huge passenger jet slam into the World Trade Centre. As she tried to tell her husband more details their e-mail account froze up as well. So they moved to instant messaging, using software from America Online and Microsoft to chat in a small window in real time on their respective computers.

"At that old low bandwidth we finally got the internet to deliver for us," he said. The lesson was obvious: "Operators of websites offering news especially need to have a contingency plan just as corporations do for when disasters hit," he said.

Prodigy 'Im Okay' Message Centre

Berkeley 'Im Okay' Message Centre

Disaster Message Service

World Trade Center Survivor Database

FBI website to report terrorist activity


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Full coverage: Terror in America

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The fatal flights

Emergency telephone numbers for friends and family of victims

These numbers are valid for calls from within New Zealand, but may be overloaded at the moment.

United Airlines: 0168 1800 932 8555

American Airlines: 0168 1800 245 0999

NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 0800 872 111

US Embassy in Wellington (recorded info): 04 472 2068

Online database for friends and family