WeatherMatrix First to Debunk "Lightning Strike Theory" for Blackout '03

August 14, 2003 -- At 4 p.m. on Thursday, August 14, 2003, 50 million people in the Northeast lost power, most for over 12 hours. At around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, a false report circulated in the media and was broadcast by all major cable news outlets: A lightning strike at Niagara, NY caused the blackout. At 7:45 p.m. WeatherMatrix Founder Jesse Ferrell posted weather information to various email addresses, lists and WeatherMatrix.Net and disproved this theory -- storms were nowhere near New York state on Thursday. Several other WeatherMatrix Members reported the same thing shortly thereafter. At 8:15 p.m. MSNBC retracted the report after talking with the National Weather Service who agreed that there were no storms in the area.

DrudgeReport.com, run by Matt Drudge (photo at left), gets over 5.5 million hits per day, and is a clearinghouse for the latest news, often scandalous or severe. On Thursday, August 14 at 8 p.m. Mr. Drudge put in a link to a harvested official lightning data image from the WeatherMatrix Report. Shortly thereafter, Rense.com linked us in and the image appeared on blogs on Fark.com and FreeRepublic.com. While it wasn't quite as impressive as the last time we were linked by Drudge, traffic and applications immediately spiked to astronomical levels for the rest of the evening and the following day.

In the 4 hours Thursday evening, after the story broke, we recorded over 20,000 hits to that image alone on WeatherMatrix.Net. Adding the extra page hits generated by the publicity, we received a week's worth of traffic on Friday alone. On Friday August 15, we received 30 Membership Applications. Our normal incoming applications would be 4-6 during that period so that was an increase of about 700%.

Overall, the information on the WeatherMatrix site available about the lightning strike theory was accessed over 70,000 times during the 2-day period.

Complete statistics are shown below.

Historically Drudge has been responsible for bringing web servers, especially small ones, to their knees within minutes of his linking them. Because we have a "burstable" bandwidth contract with Pair.com, and because we caught the link and quickly responded by reducing the size of the graphic, our site served the traffic without breaking a sweat. Even with the optimized graphic, that one graphic used nearly 4 gigabytes of transfer just Thursday night, 83% of the total bandwidth for the entire day and six times our normal daily traffic for the entire site.

We also thank LightningStorm.com and their distributor, FlightBrief.com, for making this discovery possible by posting the lightning strike data.

COMPLETE WEATHERMATRIX STATS... Thursday, 8/14/03 TOP FILE: ltg-anim-0308141800.gif Hits: 23,581 Megabytes Transferred: 2,115 (54.8%). HITS: 477,314 PAGE HITS: 27,791 DATA TRANSFER: 3,859 Mbytes TOP REFERRING SITES: #reqs: %reqs: Mbytes: %bytes: URL ----- ------ ------ ------ --- 18188: 28.08%: 1682: 83.16%: http://www.drudgereport.com/ 1295: 2.00%: http://www.rense.com/ 959: 1.48%: http://forums.fark.com/ 542: 0.84%: http://www.freerepublic.com/ Friday, 8/15/03 TOP FILE: ltg-anim-0308141800.gif Hits: 39,524 Megabytes Transferred: 1,363: (29.8)%. (Normal Day Top File Would Be 3,000 Hits) HITS: 820,931 (Normal Day Is 200,000) PAGE HITS: 41,339 (Normal Day Is 17,000) DATA TRANSFER: 4,580 Mbytes (Normal Day Is 700) TOP REFERRING SITES: #reqs: %reqs: Mbytes: %bytes: URL ----- ------ ------ ------ --- 31897: 30.77%: 1134: 74.79%: http://www.drudgereport.com/ 3395: 3.27%: : http://www.rense.com/ 529: 0.51%: : http://forums.fark.com/

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