Burning up the network

The Internet is on fire today with all the election stuff going on and it ain’t pretty. Mypollingplace.com is down as are many of the state election polling place locators (the NY state one is throwing a “Web server too busy, try again later”). Rock the Vote has been up and down. Many weblogs covering the election are having problems too. Instapundit, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Boing Boing have all been down or really slow at some point today. The large news sites like CNN and MSNBC are fine…they’re architected to handle huge surges like this. kottke.org is doing OK as well, but I’m not seeing anywhere near the traffic that Instapundit must be getting today. As great as the Internet is, it still sucks to have these single points of failure. When Boing Boing’s single server goes down or their router is handling too many requests, the site is completely offline. We need to get to the point where single sites and applications are as robust as the Internet at large.