The Big Brother craze has hit Australia after successful through the UK and Europe. Sixteen million viewers have visited the Web site in the last 24 hours, however not without a glitch.
A spokesperson for the Web site told ZDNet Australia, in the last 24 hours since the television program was broadcast, the site received 16 million visitors.
"It's a phenomenal amount of traffic," the spokesperson said.
The Australian Big Brother television program was aired on Channel 10 at at 7pm on Tuesday night, however, by eight o'clock a surge in traffic caused the site to shut down.
According to the operator, the automatic security systems registered a potential security attack - otherwise known as a denial of service (DoS) attack - which automatically shut down the site. However, Big Brother's internet service provider - Primus - realised the cause wasn't a malicious attack on the server, rather an influx of traffic.
The Web site was offline for one hour.
The Big Brother spokesperson claims the loss of service to the Web site had a flow on effect to its live streaming service, which also struggled to keep up with the mobs of visitors flocking to the site throughout the night.
As of Wednesday at 11.30am, the site announced its streaming services were fully operational.
"It wasn't that the infrastructure couldn't cope, it was more that the systems didn't believe the numbers could be real," Big Brother Online general manager Aaron Pederesen said.
According to a statement, the technical specifications for the Australian Web site were based on the experienced of the UK site, which became the most popular site in the country, accounting for nearly 40 percent of Internet traffic.
