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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

For me, the HN part of the story is that the FBI servers are having trouble keeping up with the traffic to their site.

Edit: Here's one of the responses I got while trying to load the FBI website

ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the requested URL the following error was encountered:

    Zero Sized Reply

Footprint did not receive any data for this request. Footprint 4.8/FPMCP Generated Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:42:44 GMT by 8.12.217.126 (Footprint 4.8/FPMCP)

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If anybody is looking for a mirror...

http://imgur.com/a/wRl0g

the link up top is a malformed url - looks like maybe a bad c&p

http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multip...

worked for me

Yep your link (kind of) worked. It's not loading quickly or entirely.

Wrong - it may look like a bad c&p, but if you go to fbi.gov and check the link on the right hand side, it is, in fact correct. The servers are just struggling right now with the assets, now mine are cached it loads instantly.

ya - guess you're right - what a redundant url.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but my first thought was: "Is there no one at the FBI who has ever heard of a CDN or S3 or even Imgur to upload static assets to?" The issue at hand isn't a national emergency (because the attacks happened a few days ago with the suspects apparently quiet) but one of these days, they'll need a more robust way to disseminate info.

To be fair, I don't think that many people on HN are facing the kind of traffic spike the FBI site just got.

While these photos and video are the opposite of confidential, I am not the least bit surprised that the FBI wants to keep the FBI's data on the FBI's servers given the nature of their business.

The website is public. There's nothing keeping them from having using a CDN or other caching service or, better yet, setting up their own caching servers to handle the load better.

I would find it quite amusing if the FBI was posting to imgur.

The primary release is from the fbi YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M...

There are two unblurred suspects in that video, and the FBI site has some other grainy photos of the two suspects.

The BBC have mirrored some of the data: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22211190

The site loads up fine for me, and an Etherape scan shows that the site uses more than just one or two servers.

In addition the linked footprint site is not responding!

cnn.com, nytimes.com, nbcnews.com

That's not the point. The public should be able to get the information directly from the FBI's website without it being filtered through the media. You'd think the FBI would be able to setup some server caching to handle traffic spikes to their website.

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