Katrina overwhelms weather Web sites

Several U.S. Web sites, including Weather.com, became temporarily unavailable as hordes of people went online seeking on Hurricane Katrina, which battered the U.S. Gulf Coast. Weather.com was largely unavailable from 3 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. PDT on Sunday night, as the storm was approaching its Louisiana landfall, according to Keynote Systems, which monitors Internet performance.

Availability of the National Weather Service Web site fell to 29 percent from 8:15 to 8:45 a.m. PDT Monday from its usual 94 percent to 98 percent. CNN.com and USAToday.com showed some degradation of performance on Monday morning with their home pages loading at 6 seconds and 10 seconds respectively for short periods of time. Availability of ABCNews.com went as low as 52 percent from 11 to 11:30 a.m PDT on Monday. These sites usually load at 3 or 4 seconds, said Keynote.