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The net's reaction to the election day, week, month....

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Fri Nov 10 16:57:35 2000

With a few notable exceptions, the Internet's reaction to this week's
events has been boring.

At the macro-level, the total Internet traffic barely budged.  Wednesday
traffic was slightly higher, but you had to squint to see the difference
from the previous Wednesday's traffic levels.

Even the types and number of network problems didn't change.  PSI, Verio
and Abovenet appear involved in some routing dispute.  A couple of providers
had other incidents, but only one seemed to have a major impact on service.
Last Thursday, the state of Alaska lost its long distance due to a fiber
cut.

I don't track or report on malicious activity, but even those sorts of
incidents seemed normal with most of the uptick in activity related to
the middle east, not the US election.  Pretty much business as usual.

Some traffic patterns did change.  The State of Florida's connection and
Secretary of State's web site got walloped hard.  Several news web sites
continued running in "breaking news" mode for days.  CNN, Washington Post,
and the MSNBC web sites have started adding features back to their home
pages.  The Yahoo! News site seemed to be the winner as far as web site
performance for the week, as far as the quality of their journalism, I'm
not qualified.

In general I didn't see much spill over to other web sites that may have
been hosted by the same provider, but were not breaking news sites.  So
it appears most providers had sufficient head room on their networks.