Swine flu website inundated as cases in England double in a week
BMJ 2009; 339 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b3029 (Published 24 July 2009) Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3029- Nayanah Siva
The Department of Health for England said that the number of cases of influenza A/H1N1 has almost doubled, increasing to 100 000, from about 55 000 a week ago.
The rise in cases led to an unprecedented number of people trying to access the government’s new online diagnosis service when it was launched at 3 pm on 23 July.
The site was designed to handle 1200 hits a second but had to be suspended within four minutes of launching when 2600 people tried to access it every second, equivalent to 9.3 million hits per hour. The department denied that the site had crashed and …
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