Record Traffic Day At CNN.com on US election day 2008

CNN emails to tell TechCrunch they brought in 27 million unique visitors to their site on US election day yesterday, a record. Comscore says they averaged just 5 million unique daily visitors in September, so this is more than 5x normal traffic.

The site also generated an astounding 276 million page views. An average day on CNN is about 35 million page views, according to Comscore worldwide stats.

These days, I have been busy implementing NZ election section for Fairfax Media's websites, which include www.stuff.co.nz and all the newspaper's websites such as The Dominion Post, The Press ...

The New Zealand election 2008 will take place on 8th November, between Labour's Helen Clark and National's John Key. What will the traffic jump for stuff.co.nz look like? I will see

The Sports Network brought down by Chinese Hackers

Update: It’s possible that the hackers actually thought they were taking down CNN’s sports site, based on early Twitter messages boasting about it.

Update2: Christine Lu was able to grab an image of the original hack (now top image above), which links back to hackcnn.com. It’s almost certain that they thought the site was CNN’s sports property