The season's first snowstorm earlier this week brought a huge surge in traffic to the Minnesota Department of Transportation's 511 traveler information. So many people tried accessing the system that it became overloaded, agency officials said.
Snow started falling in the metro area in the early hours of Monday morning and by 10:30 a.m. the website that features road maps with current construction, closures and delays, and weather-related road conditions had registered more than 121,420 hits. That considerably more than the average of 67,000 hits a day.
The site probably would have had more hits on Monday, but the system could not keep up with demand, said Sue Roe, an agency spokeswoman.
"MnDOT was getting so many hits that the cloud server used to help handle the increased traffic couldn't manage it," she said.
The system was more stable by Monday afternoon, she said.
This was the first storm in which MnDOT used new terminology to describe road conditions. The agency scrapped terms such as good, fair, difficult and hazardous, and this year is going with simple terms such as normal, partially covered, completely covered, travel not advised and closed. The new descriptions, which go along with the color-coded map, are meant to give travelers a better way to visualize what conditions are really like. I wrote about the change in a column a couple weeks ago.
The was accessed more than 2.8 million times between October 2013 and April 2014.
