I could not access FR from 8:30 to 10:44 pm last night EST.
It was very frustrating.
MestaMachine posted charts that showed that PSINet in DC had a bottleneck. Since I am in southern DE, I probably go through DC to get to CA on the web.
But this has happened for each of the four debates. It did not happen for the GOP debates when we had live threads earlier this year.
Every other place I went to on the web worked fine, including Facebook, last night.
What is casuing the crawl?
I don’t know what s causing it. It was reported on Twitter last night that the hacker group anonymous had done something to the twitter debate hash tag, but I don’t know what they did. My first thought would be some kind of infection in the system, but that is pure speculation.
The simplest way I can put it is as follows.
On a regular day or night when internet traffuc is basically normal, FR is quite reachable from anywhere in the country. But stop and think about LAST NIGHT.
There was baseball, football, and the debate. There were not simply millions of people online at the same time, there were TENS of millions all mostly going to twitter and facebook or liveblogging from across the country, maybe even the world. People were livestreaming all over the place. You jam the hubs. Packets try to find alternate routes but even they are already full. By the time anyone got to Free Republic, the packet loss was fifty per cent or higher because Verio was dropping packets before reaching FR as well...so the connection timed out. There isn’t much FR can do in the face of that because the packets never reached the servers.