Did Pope Benedict crash Australia’s ABC Online website?
July 15, 2008 by Dave Earley
Filed under Media, News, Online
The ABC website was down for a while yesterday morning. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen their site offline, and the message would seem to suggest it wasn’t scheduled.
I was trying to find something about a contact who was on Australian Story earlier this year, when I was faced with this ABC Online: Outage page. I tried navigating to a few other pages, but the entire abc.net.au domain was off the radar.
The following screengrab was taken Monday, July 14, 1.50am, and says:
We’re sorry…
We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.
I did wonder if the blue was a nice homage to Microsoft’s universally recognised blue screen of death. The only reason I can think of for the site being down at that time is perhaps an influx of Catholics looking for news about the Pope’s arrival in Australia. Our 1-2am would usually be prime internet traffic time for both the west and east coast of the US (8-9am and 11am-12), as well as Europe (5-6pm).
