Impact of Hurricane Katrina Slows Some Major U.S. Web Sites

San Mateo, Calif. -- As Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast,
several popular web sites had difficulty maintaining their performance and
availability, according to new information from San Mateo-based Keynote
Systems, a provider of site performance measurement services. For a period of
about three hours on Sunday night, some of the graphic content on
weather.com was not available, and the availability of other content on the site
also dipped for about 35 minutes on Monday morning. Both CNN.com and
USAToday.com, although both stable and available, also showed some
degradation of performance on Monday morning, with home pages taking up
to 10 seconds to load, or about three times as long as normal. In addition, the
National Weather Service's site went from its usual availability rate of 94%-
98% to just 29% for a short period. Keynote's performance index measures the
average download time for the home pages of 40 important sites from the 25
largest metropolitan areas of the U.S.
http://www.keynote.com/