DOJ's web traffic surged 7,000% with Mueller report release
The department's Office of the CIO secured 50,000 GBs of additional bandwidth to prepare for the April 18 posting.
Interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election translated into a massive spike in Justice.gov web traffic, but the Department of Justice's Office of the CIO scaled up services to successfully manage the loads.
DOJ CIO Joe Klimavicz, when asked by FCW about IT contingency planning related to the release, said his team "worked diligently with our web service industry partners" and procured 50,000 gigabytes of additional hosting bandwidth.
That advance preparation proved valuable, as visits to Justice.gov surged more than 7,000% on April 18. The site receives 8 million visits on an average day, Klimavicz said, but by 5 p.m. on the day of the release, there had already been more than 587 million visits -- 247 million of which came within the first hour of the report's release.
There were no IT performance or availability issues during the release of the report, Klimavicz said, noting that DOJ also increased our web server capacity to allow for faster download speeds and ensure continued accessibility of the 142 MB report throughout the day.
FCW's Chase Gunter contributed reporting to this story.