Did you have trouble downloading the California Supreme Court’s ruling on Proposition 8 in the minutes after it was released last Tuesday? Apparently, lots of folks did.
At our request, the California Supreme Court released data showing that in the 24 hours after the 10 a.m. issuance of the ruling, the California appellate courts’ general information site — www.courtinfo.ca.gov — received more than 4.7 million hits. On a normal day, that site gets only about 2 million hits.
The Supreme Court’s clerk/administrator, Frederick Ohlrich, said there were 955,000 hits in the first hour and that the demand spiked six to 10 minutes after the ruling was placed on the Internet. The Web site shut down three times in the first hour, he said.
The California Supreme Court’s home Web site — http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courts/supreme/ — was hammered with 50,167 hits. The previous Tuesday saw only 2,962.
And in that first 24-hour period, the controversial ruling was downloaded 50,472 times — 41,987 of them in pdf form and 8,485 doc files.
So that’s why it took so long to get your own personal copy. Might have been quicker to go to the court itself. Of course, you would've had to elbow your way through thousands of pro- and anti-Prop 8 demonstrators, so maybe a crashed website ain't so bad.
— Mike McKee
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