"Buckled under the strain" seems to have been the phrase of choice in referring to the choppy way websites handled the demand for US election information as voting returns began coming in.

For chunks of time some popular sites like MSNBC.com, Voter.com and the ever trashily attractive Drudgereport.com were down and out. Others, like CNN.com and ABC.com, dragged along, downloading at the relaxed pace of a Florida senior citizen. While the sites waffled afterwards about "unprecedented" and "unexpected" demand, the performance underlines how far they have to go to throw off their second-tier status.

The advantage of the Web as a news source is immediacy and always-on availability. When even an online news organisation such as MSNBC.com, whose parentage is Microsoft and NBC, cannot scale up to handle the people who want to use the service, one has to ask how seriously the sites themselves are taking their duty as news providers.