Madonna webjam shuts out monitoring firm

A company monitoring the performance of MSN's Madonna webcast this week found itself among the millions of people shut out by heavy internet traffic.

Keynote Systems criticised MSN, which webcast the London concert on Wednesday night, for claiming that the website was performing well. Keynote claims more than 60 per cent of people trying to access the site during the show were unable to do so.

However, Keynote had to count itself among the disappointed viewers since its monitoring equipment was also locked out, and was unable to provide any data between 9pm and 10pm (GMT). Keynote usually charges companies to monitor their website performance.

According to Marc Gamble, Keynote's technical support analyst, to measure the performance of a website the company "should be able to get on to the site", but said "if we can't access it, then probably the public can't access it".

"If a measurement is not successfully taken an error is recorded. It could have been the server not being able to handle requests. A high probability is that the problem was at the other end," he added.