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For week ended May 30, 1999 Posted 4 Jun 1999

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Family tree site felled

Summarized by Kent Larsen

Family tree site felled
BBC News 25May99 C9

Yesterday's formal release of the LDS Church's new family history website was such a success that the load crashed the servers as about 500 people a second tried to access the site. The site was down for six hours as IBM technicians struggled to get more support to handle the traffic. IBM, which hosts the site for the LDS Church, said that the demand was simply more that expected. "It's triple, quadruple what they anticipated." said IBM spokeswoman Jan Walbridge, "They did plan for a back-up system, but they didn't think they'd have to use it so soon."

The site, called Family Search, is located at http://www.FamilySearch.org/. It includes records on 400 million people dating back as much as 500 years ago. The site includes just a porition of the 2 billion individuals on whom the Church has collected information since 1894. The Church plans to add a further 200 million individuals to the on-line database by the end of this year.

[Editor's note. The launch of the Family Search website and the subsequent crash due to workload has been carried on every major news service, including Associated Press, Reuters, Cox, Knight-Ridder, and Scripps-Howard. It seems to have appeared in every major newspaper worldwide. - Ed.]



Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Kent Larsen · Privacy Information