The death of Australian adventurer Steve Irwin, who was also known as the “crocodile man” sent several Australian news sites into melt down for up to 30 minutes.
As many Australians in the eastern states returned from lunch news quickly spread of Irwin’s death with tens of thousands diving into news sites to access information on his unfortunate death.
The first site to go down was www.news.com.au that was also responsible for breaking the story. This was followed by www.ninemsn.com.au. Also struggling to keep up was the
“A lot of the sites seem to be going up and down,” according to news.com.au producer Mark Higginson. “We lost NineMSN entirely. Although we don’t know for sure at this stage, I presume that the Steve Irwin story is to blame. We don’t know yet whether it’s local or international traffic that is responsible for this.”
A spokesperson at NineMSN said “”We acknowledge that NineMSN is experiencing difficulties due to the huge amount of traffic trying to access the Steve Irwin story. Some customers are having trouble loading the home page. We are trying to remedy this at the moment.”
For many news organisations the problem appears to be internal servers or hosting sites as Telstra claims that there was little increase in traffic across the internet in