Swine Flu Another Victim: Traffic surge crashes swine flu Website

The site was expected to have to handle up to 1,200 hits per second, but a surge of twice that traffic volume shut the service down, embarrassing both the government and BT, which is hosting the site.

The problem appears to have been the result of an elementary capacity planning error rather than full-blown network, load balancing, server hardware or application failure.

UK chief medical adviser Sir Liam Donaldson said that a lot of people who accessed the web site started to use the checklist and then abandoned it. "It looks like there was a big element of curiosity there," he said.