The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Homepage On July 7th 2005
This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk
Although I was Senior Development Producer for the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s homepage at the time, I wasn't actually in the office to help with coverage of . By the time I'd started travelling that day, television was already .
The ´óÏó´«Ã½, of course, has a whole raft of plans and procedures for national emergencies. There was already an established process of in the event of a major story breaking. However, that didn't seem to go far enough that day.
It also soon became clear that the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s servers were straining under the sheer number of people wanting to get the latest information about the terrorist attacks. The team began reducing the content on the page in order to minimise the download footprint for each page view.
By the afternoon, the page being served was an experimental XHTML/CSS table-free version that had previously only been used as a 'proof of concept'. It worked in most legacy browsers - although I do recall that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ got emails of complaint from some users of Internet Explorer on the Mac OS. ´óÏó´«Ã½ News had a further contingency plan in place - by 11am that morning the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News site was being served via , rather than from the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s own server farm.
Stuck at home, whilst trying to get on with some other work, I kept taking screen-grabs of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ homepage each time it updated, and was uploading them to Flickr to keep .
In the middle of it, someone messaged me via Flickr, asking that I stop doing it. It was, apparently, really annoying them and wasting their time, because when they were looking for pictures of the bombings, my screengrabs kept coming up instead of pictures of the actual carnage, which is what they wanted. You do meet some funny people on the internet.
I also recall that during the rush to keep the information updated and the page running, a phone call was taken from a distant ´óÏó´«Ã½ policy department, pointing out that the homepage was erroneously referring to the recently re-branded "Action Network" service under the old name "iCan". I understand it was somewhat forcefully explained that this wasn't perhaps the most pressing issue at the time!
The flexible use of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ homepage was in contrast to how the page reacted on . The template wasn't anywhere near as malleable then, and so all that could be done was to edit the three promotional slots on the page to carry news of the unfolding events.
In order to get the information published faster, the team bypassed the CMS, and were simply using FTP to put some small HTML includes live. In fact, until the directories were cleaned up and reorganised in 2005, if you knew the right address, you could still find the HTML snippets with the last news updates from that day on them.
After the July 7th bombings, , who was part of my team, was instrumental in making sure that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ published some figures about the sheer volume of data and streaming that had been served that day. The headlines: 40,000 page requests per second on the News site, and ´óÏó´«Ã½ bandwidth usage reached 11.1Gb/sec, with an extra 3Gb/sec going to Akamai.
At that time, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ didn't have any kind of "blog" outlet like here or over at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Editors blog. Since it wasn't press release material, the numbers were hastily published in the feedback area of the site.
Incidentally, the little bump you can see on the graph from the day before was the surge of traffic rushing to find out whether London had been awarded the , which had set a much happier, but short-lived, bandwidth consumption record just the day before.
Martin Belam is a former Senior Development Producer, New Media
Comments
Once again another informative and interesting read for geeks across the globe.
I was especially interested in the statistics 11Gbs is immense.
Matt