The web sites for the BBC and Reuters struggled to remain available early this morning amid heavy traffic from Internet users seeking the latest news about this morning’s terror attacks on the London transit system. Performance for both sites has improved throughout the day. Multiple simultaneous explosions rocked London’s subway system and a passenger bus during rush hour this morning, leaving more than 30 dead and hundreds injured. The blasts came as a meeting of G8 leaders convened in Scotland.

In the hours immediately following the attacks, the BBC web site limited the number of images on its home page, which reduces server load during periods of high traffic volume, as image files tend to be larger than HTML files. That helped the BBC site remain largely available, albeit with intermittent outages and slow response times. The Reuters web site showed better response time on our uptime charts, but in many cases that response was a system message stating that the server was too busy to respond. Within several hours, the Reuters site appeared to be operating normally.

Major US news sites were seeing no performance problems, and major UK corporate sites experienced only minor problems, with only scattered, brief outages among FTSE 100 companies.