The website of the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA) was inaccessible for a few minutes today due to “an exceptionally high volume of traffic”, following the earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale recorded in Seixal.
IPMA had to make available a “simplified version” of its website.
“Page visible by direct access or redirection (due to an exceptionally high volume of traffic or maintenance actions). In the case of redirection, as soon as the situation allows it, it will return to the original page”.
In a note sent to Lusa today, the CpC Initiative: Citizens for Cybersecurity regretted the situation, which had also been recorded after the earthquake measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale felt on August 26, 2024.
“The IPMA website was once again unable to cope with the load of users who tried to find out what was happening and were unable to obtain information from the website,” he noted.
The CpC warned that IPMA’s systems “will not be resilient to increased access” when a major earthquake occurs.
“In the face of an occurrence of this type, one would expect the IPMA website to be the main, most reliable and secure source of information. Unfortunately, it was not,” he said.
The group also indicated that IPMA could minimize the risk of access to its website being interrupted with, among other measures, “code optimization”, load testing, more servers to handle increased traffic and the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) to store copies of the content on geographically distributed servers, allowing users to access resources from a nearby server.
According to IPMA, the earthquake had its epicentre around 14 kilometres from Seixal, in the district of Setúbal, and a magnitude of 4.7 on the Richter scale.
It was felt with maximum intensity in Sintra (Lisbon) and Almada (Setúbal) and with less intensity in some municipalities from the Central region to the Algarve, revealed the IPMA.