SC Emergency Division’s website crashes after coronavirus mobile alert
An emergency notification sent to South Carolina residents’ phones Tuesday evening didn’t go as well as some state officials had hoped.
That’s because it crashed the state’s emergency management website during the country’s largest health scare in at least a decade.
The notification, sent by the South Carolina Emergency Management Division around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, quickly followed Governor Henry McMaster’s executive order on Tuesday closing thousands of non-essential businesses across the state in a bid to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. While McMaster declined to order people to stay home, he urged them to do so, and the notification reflected that as well.
“Public Safety Alert: Non-essential businesses to close. Please stay home. Stop the spread of COVID19 SCEMD.ORG,” the alert read.
But many of those who immediately tapped on the link to SCEMD’s website for more information wound up going nowhere — the site crashed.
“Our website subsequently received 650 hits a second from unique users,” SCEMD said in a Facebook post. “Ten times more traffic than any incident we’ve ever activated for, even hurricanes.”
The site’s crash earned some criticism from social media users frustrated that the Emergency Division wasn’t prepared for a massive influx of visitors.
“You’re probably getting more traffic because people are afraid you’re closing the grocery stores and home depot. The order is too broad. Nobody know what is and what isn’t ‘non-essential’,” one commentor wrote.
“I find it a little odd that this was the event that triggered the alert. Hardly seems justified. An actual “stay at home” or “shelter in place” warning, sure. On top of that, the site going down probably panicked folks. I wouldn’t expect an alert during this time telling me I can’t go to the movies,” another read.
The overwhelming surge in SCEMD was also reflected in Google’s search traffic, which spiked at 6:32 p.m., according to Google Trends. That spike quickly declined, though, and within the hour, the site was back up and running.
The spread of the coronavirus reached new levels Tuesday, with the state surpassing 1,000 total cases and 20 deaths related to COVID-19. Projections from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control have roughly 8,000 cases by early May. On the national level, health experts at the White House said anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 deaths were possible even with proper social distancing measures.
This story was originally published March 31, 2020 at 8:20 PM.
