The Associated Press (www.ap.org) announced on October 21 that websites for President Bush's campaign and the Republican National Committee suffered outages for several hours on October 20. The sites began experiencing problems about 11 a.m., according to two companies that monitor Internet performance.
AlertSite.com (www.AlertSite.com), which had monitors probing the sites every 15 minutes from six U.S. locations, said it took more than three times as long to load the Bush site after 11, and nearly half the attempts were completely unsuccessful. The Republican National Committee site also took longer to load and was sporadically inaccessible. Keynote Systems Inc. (www.keynote.com), which polled the sites from 25 U.S. location every hour, also reported similar trends.
Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst for Keynote, said that many of the errors related to the Domain Name System, the computers that translate a domain name into a site's actual numeric address, and that those errors often occur when incorrect or incomplete information is loaded into the system.
