SAN MATEO, CA — August 14, 2003 — The major Internet backbones and Web sites have not been affected by Thursday afternoon's massive power outage in the Northeast so far according to Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®.
Keynote's monitoring of all major U.S. Internet backbones from the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas have not shown any difficulties during the outage so far, and major Web sites remained accessible and at their normal performance levels. A few news sites, such as www.usatoday.com and www.cnn.com, had minor performance and availability problems during the initial phases of the blackout. Such performance issues often result from heavy workloads during major news events. The two news sites rapidly recovered and returned to excellent performance.
"As is true of the telephone system, the Internet and major Web sites have been engineered with redundancy and backup power systems to withstand power outages," said Eric Siegel, principal Internet analyst at Keynote. "It’s not surprising that a power outage, no matter how widespread, didn't appreciably affect the Internet and the Web. As long as there isn't major physical damage, such as that caused by the July 2001 Baltimore tunnel fire, or major congestion, such as that caused by the "SQL Slammer" worm in January 2003, the Internet and the Web have enough redundancy and resilience to withstand most problems."
Keynote will continue to monitor the performance of the Internet for the duration of the power outage and report its findings regularly to global media.
Keynote subscription services alert the subscriber, in real time, to the impact of Internet problems on the subscriber’s Web sites and also provide tools that subscribers use to compensate for those problems before they lose customers or revenue.
Internet performance is displayed in real-time on the Keynote Internet Health Report, which is a standard tool used by major Internet Service Providers. The free version of that that report is available at http://www.internethealthreport.com.
About Keynote
Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the global leader in Internet performance management and testing services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote’s services enable corporate enterprises to benchmark, diagnose, test and manage their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Approximately 2,300 corporate IT departments and 15,400 individual subscribers rely on the company’s easy-to-use and cost-effective services to optimize revenues and reduce downtime costs without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.
Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
© 2003 Keynote Systems, Inc. Keynote and The Internet Performance Authority are registered trademarks of Keynote. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Della Lowe, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3233, dlowe@keynote.com