After the death of the leader of the Al-Qaeda group Osama Bin Laden, the internet traffic volume has increased explosively.
CNN: After the spread of the news of Bin Laden¨s death, CNN's mobile website has crashed due to traffic overload. Since many people attempted to watch the live broadcast of President Obama's speech on their cell phone, the website could not sustain the online video traffic volume so as to cause the crash.
Twitter: After the news spread, twitter's peak news volume reached 5106 pieces per second, which sets the second or third record in its history, the death of Bin Laden became the hottest topic on its website. Other news agencies will follow twitter's lead, their websites will reach overwhelming traffic volume and cause the slowdown of internet servers.
The google trends website has labeled the "Death of Bin Laden" keyword as volcano hotness item which is the highest rating in the hot topic area. This is not the first time the inquire volume of this keyword has reached its peak on google trends' website. The Baidu website has put "death of Bin Laden" keyword in the prominent number one position on its "Realtime hot spot" channel, the search volume has reached three times of the second place keyword.
The managing director of QQ product center Mr.Zhi-Hao Zheng has posted on his microblog that sudden events such as Bin Laden's death have created unprecedent demand for the internet traffic and service, the final crash of the system is the worst scenario. So there lies a critical test for the product managers to maintain high level of service. The CEO of Beijing Fastweb Inc. Mr. Zaide Liu has indicated on his microblog: fortunately the news entries in twitter are small, otherwise with load of 5000 pieces per second plus more online visits per second, without a good management and content distribution system the website can crash easily like CNN. Network engineer must consider countermeasures to handle outburst traffic volumes!
The benefit of CDN service:
When major news event occurs or website service reaches peak time, most websites are overloaded with too many users. At that time customers will face problems like not being able to visit website, losing connection to videos or streaming media servies shutting down. The advantage of CDN services is to smoothly handle the sudden increase of online traffic due to major events, also it can increase the speed of website visits.