CNN's ability to deal with a world crisis (Score 1)

Last year at the USENIX LISA 2001 conference I had the great pleasure to hear William LeFebvre of CNN talk about why the CNN website came down on 9/11 and what has been done to improve their ability to respond to a crisis of this scale. His discussion included details about how users repeatedly hitting "reload" caused basically a DDoS attack and how slashdot relieved some of the load. Also, after the site was back up, he and his co-workers had to swing some servers over to the cartoon network because of all the children who were sent home from school. Here is a link that includes some of the details from that talk. http://www.tcsa.org/lisa2001/cnn.txt