Starr Frenzy

The release of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton produced some gridlock on the Internet, but the network survived a feeding frenzy of Web surfers seeking to read the document.

Sprint Corp., which operates a major data pipeline on the Internet, said traffic on its Internet backbone peaked at 5 p.m. Sept. 11 after the report was released, with volume of about 17% above the same period a week earlier.

NetRatings, an online tracking service based in Milpitas, Calif., estimated the number of people who viewed the Starr report on Friday afternoon at 3.1 million. They spent an average of 30 minutes viewing the report, about 30 times longer than the 1 minute average time usually devoted to viewing the typical Web document, the company said.

The report, initially offered by the Library of Congress and three other federal government sites, was quickly made available at leading Internet search engines as well as on the Web pages of major news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The most popular place to access the Starr report was the MSNBC site, followed by Yahoo, the Library of Congress and CNN, according to NetRatings.

While at least half of all attempts to access CNN and other commercial news sites succeeded, the government fared much worse in accommodating Web surfers. Only one in 10 attempts by users seeking access to the Web site of the House of Representatives succeeded on the Friday afternoon after the report was posted, according to Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, Calif., firm that monitors performance of the computer network. As the weekend wore on and the report became available at more Web sites, Internet performance improved, the Keynote report said.