House Web site overwhelmed by e-mails
This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT with a graphic and more details.
The Web site for the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed this week by a deluge of visitors trying to e-mail their congressmen and download the financial bailout bill the House rejected Monday.
News.com Poll
The site on Monday saw three to four times its normal traffic, according to Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House chief administrative officer. The traffic has slowed down the site and made it inaccessible to some, a problem that continued into Tuesday morning.
"It's extraordinary--the highest level of Web traffic we've seen," Ventura said Tuesday. "This doesn't even compare to the release of the 9-11 Commission Report."
After the financial bailout bill was defeated in the House Monday, the number of people trying to download the bill diminished, he said, but the number of people using the House's standard e-mail form to contact congressmen continues to rise.
"We received millions of e-mails last night," Ventura said. "It was pretty staggering."
Keynote Systems, which measures Internet performance, has been tracking the availability and performance of the House site. It has found that for the past week, the problems have persisted from early in the morning on the East Coast through the business day on the West Coast. The graph below shows the site's performance was temporarily back to normal over the weekend.
The House has implemented measures to limit the amount of e-mails flowing through to congressmen during high-traffic periods. If a person is tries to e-mail his representative during one of those periods, he may receive a mechanized response indicating the system is overwhelmed and to try later. Ventura said the problem could last through the week.
"We had people working on it all night, and we still do," he said.
The House site is not the only government site that has been affected. The Library of Congress' legislation database, Thomas, has posted a notice on its front page: "Due to a high volume of traffic, some Thomas users have reported problems running searches. We are working on this issue." It also provides a direct link to the bailout bill.
This graph from Keynote Systems measures the average download performance of the House Web site in 10 cities, four times an hour over four-hour periods since September 20. Though performance was back to normal over the weekend, the site clearly was slower in the past week, coinciding with news of the bailout bill.
(Credit: Keynote Systems)
Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. 
A website shouldn't be overwhelmed by e-mails. It can be overwhelmed by hits / request -- emails use a different protocol and shouldn't interfere with web operation.
If they put their email server on the same machine as the web site, then there can be some problems... maybe they could use a few billions of the proposed bailout budget to buy a new server ;-)
The Community Reinvestment Act (http://www.ffiec.gov/cra/) had the Fed *mandating* that banks in urban areas stop using "outdated" criteria for mortgages such as income verification, verification of where your down payment comes from, and credit history. If the banks didn't give the loan, the Feds threatened to sue the banks for discrimination and all that nonsense. Having a gun at their heads, the banks (unfortunately) complied. Well, as long as housing prices continued to rise, things were OK, right?
Two other things contributed:
- Fannie/Freddie: Banks knew they could make bad loans and sell them, as the Government Sponsored Enterprises would be the ultimate safety net.
- FASB "mark-to-market" where the FASB ruling said that bad loans should be valued as high as good ones, thus allowing these companies to make hay on bad loans.
A lot of things - government to greed - conspired to create this mess. And, as usual, government reaction is to fix the problem they helped create by throwing more of your money at it. The market will correct - we don't need government bailout. The government could solve some of this by changing the "mark-to-market" rule, actually. But they'd rather spend your dosh to bail out their buddies. Go figure.
I think the mortgage default rate is more like 6%, but to me that doesn't sound like a killer. Many people bought McMansions and several Escalades while I was quietly paying off my tiny condo and driving the same car for over 13 years. I don't feel that I should be bailing them out, nor should I be bailing out private companies on Wall St.
I have used http://www.DownsizeDC.org to send notes to my reps/senators throughout this, including "spanking" my rep for voting yes to the bailout.
Oh...I understand that the US automobile industries got $25B of our money last week while we were distracted. Another case of the government bailing out people who continue to get themselves into trouble and making it my problem.
As they said on Jericho: "NUTS!"
The Community Reinvestment Act (http://www.ffiec.gov/cra/) had the Fed *mandating* that banks in urban areas stop using "outdated" criteria for mortgages such as income verification, verification of where your down payment comes from, and credit history. If the banks didn't give the loan, the Feds threatened to sue the banks for discrimination and all that nonsense. Having a gun at their heads, the banks (unfortunately) complied. Well, as long as housing prices continued to rise, things were OK, right?
Two other things contributed:
- Fannie/Freddie: Banks knew they could make bad loans and sell them, as the Government Sponsored Enterprises would be the ultimate safety net.
- FASB "mark-to-market" where the FASB ruling said that bad loans should be valued as high as good ones, thus allowing these companies to make hay on bad loans.
A lot of things - government to greed - conspired to create this mess. And, as usual, government reaction is to fix the problem they helped create by throwing more of your money at it. The market will correct - we don't need government bailout. The government could solve some of this by changing the "mark-to-market" rule, actually. But they'd rather spend your dosh to bail out their buddies. Go figure.
I think the mortgage default rate is more like 6%, but to me that doesn't sound like a killer. Many people bought McMansions and several Escalades while I was quietly paying off my tiny condo and driving the same car for over 13 years. I don't feel that I should be bailing them out, nor should I be bailing out private companies on Wall St.
I have used http://www.DownsizeDC.org to send notes to my reps/senators throughout this, including "spanking" my rep for voting yes to the bailout.
Oh...I understand that the US automobile industries got $25B of our money last week while we were distracted. Another case of the government bailing out people who continue to get themselves into trouble and making it my problem.
As they said on Jericho: "NUTS!"
Ya see.. they can steal $85 billion of your dollars and give it to AIG but they can't bother to upgrade their e-mail capacity so you can tell them not to.
- by GlennAllen October 1, 2008 5:50 AM PDT
- Maybe they should start using Yahoo for their govt. email? :D
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