Technology in a crisis

So it was a pretty bad day on Thursday with the London bombings,

but I think its interesting to see how technology was used during the crisis.

For example everyone turns to online news sources to try and get immediate information on what's going on, and this shows in the stats. For example the BBC are reporting that at the peak they were serving 1.7 gigabits of data and receiving 40000 page request every second!!!
That a massive amount of data and on the whole the site coped pretty well - there were a few times when I couldn't get through but not much!

I'm sure there was an increase in the streaming connections as well. We were streaming BBC news 24 live and after some issues getting connected the video was suprisingly good quality!

Another interesting fact is that Technorati were reporting over a thousand blog posts about the incident within an hour of it happening!!

Also the mobile networks were put under immense strain to cope with the number of calls requested.

All of these things show how technology helps people keep in touch and find out what's going on in times of crisis. It also shows that its not quite good enough yet - calls didn't get through, pages didn't come in etc. - but it sure does help.