Cheerleaders fiasco drowns official site

The Panthers whipped the Buccaneers yesterday, but surfing the web, you’d hardly know it. All a fan can find on the internet is talk about the two Panthers cheerleaders who were allegedly having sex in a Tampa club’s bathroom stall the night before.

But what is worse, is that you can’t get online to Panthers.com to get anything related to the game. It’s crashed, and been replaced by a Panthers.com graphic for the time being. No quotes, no notes, no stats and no video highlights.

According to IT Professional Donavon Yelton, "A "hit" in web terms is the loading of a piece of data on a website. This might be a html or a javascript application. There can be several "hits" per page load, depending on how complex the website is. The more power you have behind your webserver (CPUs, memory, etc.) and the more load-balancing techniques used (co-location) will affect how many "hits" your website(s) can handle each second."

"Webservers are usually "load-tested" to see what capacity they can handle, but when something abnormal happens that drives traffic up well beyond capacity then the webserver is brought to it's knees and usually will not let anyone on," explained Yelton.

In other words, too many people trying to connect at one time. Sex scandals involving cheerleaders can do that to a site.

One panthers source confirmed that the domain had over 40 million hits this morning alone.

"It simply can't handle the extra traffic," Yelton said of the servers handling Panthers.com.

There is no word on when Panthers.com will be back online and fully functional.