John Glenn may have been hurtling into space at 3,500 mph Thursday, but back on Earth, Web sites serving information and video of the event were moving at a snail's pace.
"As of right now, you're seeing a capacity issue -- servers can't handle it," Philip Worob, vice president of sales at Net monitoring service MIDS said during the moments leading up to the shuttle's liftoff.
Preliminary results showed many sites hitting capacity during the launch. Measurements were taken from Internet news sites, NASA servers containing information and video clips of the Glenn mission, and video webcasting sites.
"We've been doing measurements over the past week on various NASA sites as well as media sites," Worob said. "As of today, we've been doing them every 15 minutes, and things definitely started to increase."
The service was still compiling data Thursday afternoon for a final tally.
Though depicting representative Net traffic conditions is considered impossible today, network professionals consider MIDS' methods reasonably sound.
CNN acknowledged it was unable to meet demand for video of the launch, fingering its partner as the cause.
"CNN was able to serve out video of the Glenn launch from its own servers," said Monty Mullig, CNN's vice president of Internet technologies. "But our overflow partner may or may not have beeen able to meet the demand. We cannot say more until we [have] reviewed the data."
CNN's Web site saw a record peak of 494,000 hits per minute. That figure is 45 percent higher than the previous record set on 11 September by the release of the Starr Report.
Worob said he personally tried to access live video and audio of the event around the Web, but could only enter one site. Worob said the company's attempts to access sites, including CNN and MSNBC, went unanswered.
During the time of the launch, for example, MSNBC's site returned the message "HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy," followed later by a text page indicating that the site was having technical difficulties.
A spokeswoman for CNN Interactive said the service was not aware of people having problems getting to the site itself.
Broadcast.com observed a slowdown to its Web site, but Henry Heflich, the company's chief technical officer, said the numbers, somewhere in the tens of thousands, outdid President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony.
"We did receive a tremendous amount of traffic that was hitting our Web sites. I don't know the number yet ... but it was definitely more than we had seen from the Clinton event."
