House servers suffering from financial bail-out

The U.S. House of Representatives website continues to suffer severe latency this morning. A Firefox visit at 6:30 am Pacific time took easily 10 seconds to load and the associated style sheet never did load. The problem appears to stem from a massive overload of traffic from citizens downloading the rejected financial bail-out bill and trying to comment on the "Write Your Rep" feature. ABC News reported yesterday that feature had shut down, with site administrators posting a "go away and come back later" message:

While we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.

Obviously, it's time for the House and other government agencies to look at doing a serious upgrade. House spokesman Jeff Ventura agrees:

If this is sort of your barometer of what a landmark legislative event is, clearly you want to scale up to that level, probably in the not-too-distant future.