Major news brings major traffic to the Web. When a pilot manages to safely land an engineless plane disabled by a flock of birds resulting in saving the lives of 150 individuals, people care.
According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, there were 4,962,523 peak visitors per minute consuming Internet news at 5:30 PM on January 15th of 2009, shortly after reports of the crash.
This ranks The Flight 1549 story at number 7 in highest Internet usage peaks since August 18, 2005, when the index was first created.
Other key events that have topped yesterdays story in web consumption are: coming in at number Two, June 22, 2006, the day the US was eliminated by Ghana in the World Cup. And Number One, November 4, 2008, Barack Obama’s victory against John McCain in the US Presidential Election. Below I’ve attached the top 15 highest web peaks based on total visitors per minute, taken from Akamai’s Net Usage Index.
A little bit about Akamai taken from their News Index FAQ:
The Akamai Net News Index is the world’s first and only daily Web traffic benchmark that tracks where news is being consumed on a global basis.
