Europeana website overwhelmed on its first day by interest of millions of users

On the first day of its launch, Europe's digital library Europeana was overwhelmed by the interest shown by millions of users in this new project. On the basis of expert advice, Europeana had anticipated up to 5 million hits per hour on the site. The real interest was 3 times as strong. This massive interest slowed down the service so much that after having already doubled server capacity yesterday at noon, the Europeana management in The Hague (Netherlands) and the European Commission last night had to temporarily take down the site to take pressure off it. This is an unexpected difficulty, but it is also an encouraging sign that citizens in Europe and around the world have great interest in Europe's digital library. It also provides strong motivation for the Europeana team and the experts from the Commission working on the project to intensify their efforts and the site's technical back-up even further. Europeana must now be made more robust to deal with peak hour requests as they happened yesterday - thousands of users searching in the very same second for famous cultural works like the Mona Lisa or books from Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce. The European Commission and the experts from the Europeana project are working on this day and night to make a fully functional Europeana service available as soon as possible. The Commission and the Europeana management are confident that Europeana will be up and running again by mid-December.For the time being, a demo version of Europeana will be available at http://dev.europeana.eu/