It seems that even the biggest of mobile news sites can’t take the heat when something big happens. Tough luck for CNN, who found its mobile site going down as the public tried to access the live broadcast of President Obama’s speech regarding the death of Osama bin Laden.
Meanwhile, this topic is becoming more and more popular on Twitter and major news sites had to suffer from lag or slow loading. Even after Obama’s speech was over, CNN’s mobile site took 6 times longer to load. With the news basically breaking out on Twitter first, there are already thousands of articles on the web concerning bin Laden’s death (3,233 were available on May 1st, but the number has grown).
Keynote, mobile and web cloud monitoring service mentions that a lot of stress is put on sites on the West Coast of the US, as the folks on the East Coast have gone to bed. With the number of smartphones growing, we should be prepared for such outages in the future, or better said news sites should try to face the rush of the public to get the fresh piece of info.
Even the royal wedding spike was surpassed by Osama’s death, according to Keynote.
