Unprecedented interest in the range of new services offered through the ireland.com portal site, launched by The Irish Times yesterday, put enormous pressure on the technology used to deliver the information into the public domain. This meant many users experienced severe difficulty trying to access the site.
Mr Seamus Martin, Editor, Electronic Editions, apologised to users who experienced difficulties. "We were overwhelmed by the response, particularly by the demand for our new Web-based email service. We are doing everything we can to increase our capacity and solve the problem," he said.
The computer-servers which power the Website can supply information to over 2,000 distinct users at any given moment, but such was the enormous popularity of the new services on offer from early yesterday the site was overwhelmed several times.
Technical staff have been working to cater for the increased demand and are introducing several mirror sites to improve speed of access to ireland.com. The root cause of the technical difficulties lay in problems with servers throughout the world, which were slow to recognise the new address through which all traffic is now routed.
Despite difficulties in connecting to the site, over 7,000 new addresses were registered for the ireland.com domain name, the free Web-based email service.