The Europeana website, a digital library launched by the EU which includes paintings, photos, films, books, maps and manuscripts from around 1,000 museums, national libraries and archives across Europe, crashed with a couple of hours of its start-up!
The site attracted more than 10 million hits an hour, more than double the number which had been anticipated, and promptly crashed.
Europeana hope to be up and running again in December after a few ‘technological improvements’ are made which will allow it to cope with such a demand and continue operating even during peaks. I suppose it’s encouraging to know that there are still some people interested in culture!
When it does come back online, the address is europeana.eu. You can, of course, visit the site now, but all you’ll get is this message:
The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour). We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December.