Web sites crash under World Cup strain

The World Cup got underway yesterday

ITV's web site crashed yesterday as millions went online to watch Mexico play South Africa in the first World Cup match of the 2010 tournament, highlighting the need for companies to invest more in back-end infrastructure.

The site was temporarily down and users experienced poor quality pictures when screens froze at frequent intervals during the match.

Nick Barron, of hosting firm Carrenza, explained that companies frequently neglect to invest in the architecture that will allow their infrastructure to scale to meet surges in demand.

"Although this is extremely unfortunate for football fans, ITV has joined a long list of distinguished names that have experienced technical glitches when their web sites have proved successful and resulted in huge surges in traffic," he said.

"Today's problems highlight how important it is to ensure that sites are designed from the beginning with the architecture capable of meeting high demand."

Twitter users were quick to criticise ITV. A user called Uponnothing wrote: "ITV web streaming football is a huge fail. They'll pay millions for Adrian Chiles but much less on decent web servers."

Another, Andrew Wilmot, wrote: "Was afraid this might happen. Both tvcatchup.com and ITV completely failing under the load of the first World Cup match."

However, Mike Hellers, senior network architect at Interoute, owner and operator of Europe's largest fibre optic network, played down the glitches.

"If you look at the core of the internet that connects Europe to Africa there hasn't been any major traffic peak. Nor has there been a significant increase of traffic that passes through the public exchanges that facilitate internet traffic between the continents," he said.

"It might be the connection to houses that gets a little clogged. But obviously this can be different within broadband networks, where capacity bottlenecks might exist."