Millions of cubicle dwellers across the country helped set records for Internet traffic on Tuesday as they watched online video of the inauguration ceremonies -- or at least tried to. The overwhelming demand meant that some Web sites and data networks had trouble keeping up, forcing many people to turn to less cutting-edge forms of media.
"It was really frustrating to have this great technology and still not be able to watch the speech," said Dan Robinson, who runs the box office at the Julliard School in New York. "I had to use this TV from the early '80s and some rabbit ears to watch it."
All told, tens of millions watched video streams from Akamai at some point during the day, said Jeff Young, a spokesman for the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.
Akamai competitor Limelight Networks Inc. of Tempe, Ariz., said 2.5 million people watched the inauguration on sites that use Limelight for delivery, with most of the viewers staying for Obama's entire speech.
Not all Web sites were able to keep up with the flood of traffic: CNN.com had to place some viewers on a "wait list" for a while before they could view the live stream. The Associated Press had issues as well _ from a bit after noon until shortly before 1 p.m., new viewers could not access its video streams on various Web sites. Akamai streams video for both companies.
The huge number of video viewers appears to have slowed the Internet as a whole. Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Web site performance, said the Internet's top 40 sites slowed by as much as 60 percent when the ceremony started at 11 a.m., and many news sites saw even sharper declines in performance. NPR.org was almost completely unavailable around noon.
People also kept accessing WhiteHouse.gov to see when it would be updated with the new president's portrait, at one time making the site take 15 times longer than normal to load, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote. Obama's picture was posted at 12:07 p.m.
In terms of the number of news Web site pages perused, Tuesday was not a record day. Akamai's global index of news consumption put the top usage at 5.4 million visitors per minute, below the 8.6 million registered on Election Day.
That's because surfers went straight to the Web videos on Tuesday, rather than repeatedly refreshing news pages to get the latest updates, according to Young.
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AP Technology Writer Rachel Metz contributed to this report.