Hurricane season brings need to prep for web traffic surges
Outages can occur when servers — physical spaces, sometimes cloud-based, that hold data and have limited capacity — get overwhelmed and shut down. If that happens, it could mean a problem for people seeking information.
When Hurricane Matthew barreled down on Florida in October, two of the National Hurricane Center’s websites — noaa.gov and hurricanes.gov — went offline for about three hours.
The disruption began at about 11 p.m. Oct. 6, 2016, and lasted until the sites were restored at 2 a.m. Oct. 7, 2016.
Once the outage was reported, technicians had to work behind the scenes to restore the site, National Hurricane Center’s Miami-based spokesman Dennis Feltgen said in an email.
In that time, forecasters issued their predictions and storm-path information through the National Weather Service’s instant messaging feature, social media and radio.
The root cause of the problem was eventually traced to a “hardware anomaly” at NOAA’s web operations center, Feltgen said.
Some agencies have tried to bolster their website information by jumping into social media. Just last week, Seminole County Chief Administrator Tricia Setzer conducted live tests of Facebook Live, the social media giant’s live-streaming service.
If a large storm comes through this summer, Setzer says the county will update residents through emergency alerts, updates on its website PrepareSeminole.org and, for the first time this year, its social-media channels.
“As technology advances, we have to do our best to stay in front of it, if possible,” she said. “We need to stay on top of it.”
During her Facebook session, Setzer answered questions from residents about hurricanes and inclement weather.
“It has become, really, how we communicate, even beyond our websites,” she said. “We like to drive people to our site, but, to get the word out, we use social media.”
But many still seek organizations’ websites. Following the June 12, 2016, shootings at Pulse, visitors to the website for OneBlood, the region’s blood bank, spiked 2,700 percent in one day, as people sought information about donations for victims. The website usually is sustained on three servers. On that day, 15 were used.
“The goal in any emergency is to get people to the right page that has the right information,” Moore said.
For Solodev, hurricane season brings another high-stress time, where they track clients’ websites, expecting strong surges of traffic.
Moore said last year took a toll on him, but that it’s part of the industry Solodev has joined.
“It was nerve-wracking because it’s important to make sure nothing goes wrong,” he said. “But you’re praying that if it does, you can handle it.”