1940 census site nearly freezes after researchers flood pages

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The newly released 1940 U.S. census is such a digital smash that it took a day for the website hosting it to get up to speed after tens of millions of hits almost paralyzed it.

The National Archives said Tuesday that census pages again are available for viewing. The government website got 37 million hits hours after the information was first released to the public Monday morning, all but shutting out would-be researchers from the records.

“We expected a flood, and we got a tsunami,” Archives.com, the private company that’s hosting the website, said in a statement.

The government released the 1940 census records — the single largest collection of digital information ever made available online by the National Archives — for the first time after 72 years of confidentiality expired. The records allow individuals and families to learn details about their pasts.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press show the National Archives badly underestimated their popularity. The no-cost contract awarded in November to the third-party Web host required that the site be able to handle up to 10 million hits per day and up to 25,000 concurrent users. The documents also said the site was expected to scale up to handle greater demand.

In another document issued in early 2011 that explained why the National Archives wanted to contract hosting of the records, the archives said its own site could handle only between 250 and 500 concurrent users.

In a tweet posted after 5 p.m. Monday on its Twitter account, the archives said the website had gotten 37 million hits since the information was released at 9 a.m. A spokesman for the company hosting the records said they were receiving even more traffic Tuesday as interest in the 1940 census continued to grow.

Joe Godfrey, the senior director of projects for Archives.com, said he didn’t immediately have updated information on how many hits they had received but said it was expected to exceed Monday’s.