Chile mine rescue spurred unprecedented global coordination and massive online witness

Chile mine rescue spurred unprecedented global coordination - CSMonitor.com

33 MINERS FREE! **GOOGLE EARTH PLACEMARK** CHILE MINER LOCATION



(CNN) -- The rescue of Chile's trapped miners has become one of the most-watched Web events in recent memory, according to an internet monitor.
Between 4 and 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, online news traffic grew to more than 4 million page views per minute, making the miners' rescue the fifth most-read-about online event since Akamai's Net Usage Index for News debuted in 2005.
The now-complete rescue of 33 miners trapped more than 2,000 feet below the ground for 69 days is topped in traffic only by World Cup matches, Wimbledon and Barack Obama's presidential election as the top online news event.
On June 24, the longest ever Wimbledon tennis match and a simultaneous World Cup soccer game set the record for most online news traffic, with 10.4 million page views per minute, according to Akamai. Obama's election as U.S. president in November 2008 was the fourth most-watched Web news event with 4.3 million page views per minute, the internet monitor says.
Overall internet traffic on Wednesday was up 15 to 20 percent, according to that company's Real-time Web Monitor. On Wednesday afternoon, most of that traffic appeared to be coming from the northeast United States and Western Europe, according to a global traffic map published by Akamai.