Traffic surge crashes swine flu web site after four minutes

Hundreds of thousands of people could not access the swine flu site

Four minutes after the government's National Pandemic Flu Service web site went live yesterday at three o'clock, the site crashed. Around 2,600 people a second tried to access the site.

The site was expected to have to handle up to 1,200 hits per second, but a surge of twice that traffic volume shut the service down, embarrassing both the government and BT, which is hosting the site.

The problem appears to have been the result of an elementary capacity planning error rather than full-blown network, load balancing, server hardware or application failure.

UK chief medical adviser Sir Liam Donaldson said that a lot of people who accessed the web site started to use the checklist and then abandoned it. "It looks like there was a big element of curiosity there," he said.

BT has since bumped up the capacity of the web site four-fold.

High-profile public web site crashes are not uncommon, especially when the sites get hit by abnormal traffic spikes. In February 2009, the National Rail, South West Trains and Transport for London web sites all crashed after bad weather cause a huge surge in the number of commuters checking service availability online. Even though the Met Office correctly predicted the bad weather, the web sites still failed.