It had to happen. Relaunching on the day news organisations around the world reported on the Virginia Tech gunman’s video statements, Sky News’ video-heavy website couldn’t cope when workers hit their site in huge numbers at lunchtime.

The site was inaccessible for at least an hour before a stripped-down version of the homepage went live around 1pm. Even then, response times were snail-like.

Of course, crashes like this are not new: on September 11 news websites around the world crashed under the demand, and a number of blogs sprang up to distribute the information around the net, but Sky seems to be the only site to have struggled today.