Swine Flu fears crash diagnosis website

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 24 Jul 2009 at 10:33

The Government's Swine Flu website was brought crashing to a halt just minutes after launch, with 2,600 people visiting every second.

The website offers diagnosis and advice and was established to ease the pressure on overloaded GPs. However, the sheer weight of traffic was too much for the service with visitors to the site hitting the following notice just minutes after it was activated at 3pm:

"The service is currently very busy and cannot deal with your request at this time. Please try again in a little while."

The website continued to be up and down as it was bombarded with more than nine million visits an hour, according to the Department of Health.

The situation continued for the next couple of hours until the Department of Health quadrupled server capacity at 5:30pm. It later admitted that the site had initially been designed to handle 1,200 hits a second, and completely misjudged the scale of public interest.

A department of health spokesperson blamed the problems on "public curiosity".

"During the early hours of the service, people were very keen to look at the site. We were swamped by the interest. We have been working hard with our IT people to expand the capacity in order to meet demand," the spokesperson says.

However, the oppositions claimed the Government should have worked harder to ensure the system could cope with requests.

"This is obviously very worrying and raises serious questions about the robustness of the pandemic flu system," says Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman. "The Government claims the reason for the delay in setting up this service was because it needed to thoroughly test it to ensure this wouldn't happen."

"It is absolutely vital that the public have access to a reliable source of information on swine flu to provide reassurance and to take the pressure off GPs surgeries," he concludes.