Oireachtas says nothing ‘malevolent’ in web crash during RTÉ’s committee hearings

Leinster House was forced to investigate whether there had been any “malevolent” effort to overwhelm their website.

Internal records explained how their website normally gets 4,000 requests per hour.

However, in the space of five minutes on the day of the very first committee meeting about RTÉ, it received an unprecedented 10,000 such requests.

Emails detailed how there had not been enough computer processing power to scale up for such high demand.

This led to what was described as a “connection storm” scenario that ultimately caused the website to crash for almost an hour.

A message from one official said: “Christ above. OK, work through and let me know.”

Karin Whooley, web manager at the Houses of the Oireachtas, said the outage had lasted around 50 minutes, though the actual livestream of the hearings continued to work as normal behind the broken home page.

An email from Whooley, sent the day after the crash, said: “Essentially the website should scale automatically to cope with large volumes of traffic — but it seems it didn’t do so yesterday and users were unable to get to the site.”

The web manager said the outage was “less than ideal” and had not been helped by the fact that the failure happened at lunchtime, meaning it was not “escalated” to key staff as quickly as it might have been.

Whooley also said they needed to find out why immediate alerts had not operated as intended when the “infrastructure creaks” occurred.

“For today’s PAC meeting, the ICT guys have ramped up the infrastructure to make sure there is loads of capacity,” she added.

In a separate update to Clerk of the Dáil Peter Finnegan (the most senior official in the Oireachtas Service), the IT team said it did not appear there was “anything malevolent” about the outage, and no sign of a deliberate effort from outside to bring down the website intentionally.

In an email, Whooley said: “The website infrastructure is normally super robust, and [we were] a bit surprised that this occurred, but I think it’s an anomaly.”

However the livestream had continued to operate, which meant people could continue to watch the hearings through the Oireachtas app and on live feeds that were available on various news websites.

​An internal briefing note explained how the lunchtime meeting on June 28 had caused a “massive surge” in visits that had led to a “huge spike” in requests to the Oireachtas database.

It said that ahead of the June 29 hearing between RTÉ officials and the Public Accounts Committee, the IT department had successfully scaled up their online infrastructure in preparation for further massive demand.

The briefing said: “[For that one] we had over 20,000 web requests within the five minutes before the start of the meeting and we had no reported issues.

“Though we did see spikes on the infrastructure, the website and all streams worked as expected.”

Further committee hearings involving RTÉ were held on both July 5 and July 6, with the Oireachtas again making sure they were ready to cope with demand.

“On both those days, we had over 35,000 web requests in the minutes leading up to the meetings,” said the briefing.

However, the biggest test the online service faced was when Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly appeared before the Public Accounts Committee on July 11 — and that passed off with no trouble.

The report said: “We had over 80,000 web requests for this meeting and had no reported issues.”