'Digg effect' takes down Nancy Pelosi's website

A Digg story that contained a link to a statement on the website of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reached the front page this morning, apparently sending so much traffic to Pelosi's site that it crashed completely. 

The blog entry was a comment on a rule reportedly being drafted by the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services. The rule would threaten to cut funding to medical care providers which refused to hire personnel who preferred not to perform abortions for religious or moral reasons.

Commentators have noted that the proposal's definition of abortion is so broad that it could include, as the Times' Countdown to Crawford blog wrote, "multiple forms of contraception, including some birth control pills, IUDs and emergency 'morning after' contraception." (C2C also posted about this situation).

Pelosi's statement, reproduced here, reads in part:

If the Administration goes through with this draft proposal, it will launch a dangerous assault on womens' health.

The majority of Americans oppose this out of touch position that redefines contraception as abortion and represents a sustained pattern of the Bush Administration to reject medical and sound science in favor of a misguided ideology that has no place in our government.

Digg can send thousands of visitors to a website at a time, a level of traffic concentration that can bring down even large and relatively well-established sites. It's probable that the Speaker.gov site rarely gets spikes of this size, and so -- like many websites that get Dugg, Drudged, Slashdotted or even Yahoo! Buzzed -- they'll have to learn the hard way that there's no such thing as too much bandwidth.

When I called Pelosi's office, the spokesperson I talked to did not know there was a problem with the site. When he tried to load it himself, it did not come up. He said he'd look into it and call back.

UPDATE (12:19 p.m.):  The site appears to be back up and running.

Comments

[Mike McShea]

Why aren't condoms listed? Male devices are OK? Didn't the government agency understand its marching orders from Liberty University PR department or the boys only club in the Vatican?

Why are so call moral issues or privacy/personal issues, political issues in America?