Bailout bill reaction took down US House of Representatives website
On Monday, the US House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion emergency package for the US financial system. After the bill was rejected, the House website was so overwhelmed with visitors seeking information or wanting to email their representatives that the whole website effectively crashed.
“We haven’t seen this much demand since the 9-11 commission report was posted on the site in 2004,” said Jeff Ventura, spokesman for the House Chief Administrative Officer. “We’re being overwhelmed with Web traffic about the bill.”
The slowdown affected all House-member websites since they are all tied into one system.
Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge wrote on Monday that when he tried accessing the website, it took about two minutes to load, and loaded without style sheets.
Today, Tuesday, the website seems to be back to normal.
AP via Data Center Knowledge.
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Svetlana Gladkova
September 30th, 2008 at 5:50 am
How comes you use “took down” in the title when it was about slowdown mostly with some people unable to access because of server timeout, I believe, not actual downtime.
Pingdom
September 30th, 2008 at 6:15 am
@Svetlana: Thanks for commenting.
The reason we wrote “took down” is that if a website takes extremely long to load it is in all practicality down. How many would wait two minutes (and for an incomplete page) like Rich Miller did?
We should add that most web browsers time out if they can’t get a response from the web server in 15 seconds.
j mikow
September 30th, 2008 at 10:35 am
The site is still down for many members. The communication links with the financial services committee, the primary committee responsible for the bail out bill, is only partially functional and that includes the contact Email that is not owkring.
Buck McHugh
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Basically this bailout bill and a few interest rate cuts will at best postpone a train wreck in the equity markets. None the less, a train wreck is coming regardless of this infusion of funds in the short term. If panic sets in after the Fed runs out of ammunition and can not cut rates any further then we will see a crash in the stock market. If the stock market breaks down below 9500, we could test 2003 levels all over again. We are talking Dow 7500 folks. The other negative effect of this bill is that it will cause more debt burden on the tax payer and the Fed will print more money. This will in turn cause hyper-inflation and the dollar will crash relative to other major currencies like the euro and the yen. I am seriously worried about an economic melt down and possibly a depression. Comment by Buck McHugh former VP of Investments at A.G.Edwards and graduate of Cambridge University’s Judge Institute of Management Studies.
Liam Keyes
May 26th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I find it interesting that Buck McHugh is putting his two cents in on this subject. Buck was never V.P. of Investments in AG Edwards. Furthermore, he resigned from that firm under pressure as the Secretary of States Office in Massachusetts was investigating him for scamming money from Retirees from the Former Boston Edison Company(now N-Star). He will never be allowed to work in Massachusetts in that field ever again.