Web Can't Keep Up With Whipsawing Market

The stock market whipsawed so quickly this afternoon—a quick plunge to nearly 1,000 in the red, followed by an equally quick rebound of about 500 points—that the Internet just couldn't keep up. "It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right," writes MG Siegler at TechCrunch.

Google Finance and Yahoo Finance were among the sites that either brought up error messages of failed completely. Twitter to the rescue? Not quite. "At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc," writes Siegler. "The problem is that the 'realtime' web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing."
(More Dow Jones stories.)