Traffic Hits Web Sites After Crash

Tuesday, November 13th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ An anxious public flooded the Internet for news immediately after Monday's American Airlines crash, forcing some news sites to take special measures to meet the demand.

MSNBC.com, for instance, moved its non-breaking graphics and interactive features to inside pages. CNN also went to a streamlined version.

News organizations took similar measures on Sept. 11 when Internet users jammed sites for news on the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Keynote Systems, which measures Internet performance, said its monitors needed 26 seconds to reach MSNBC and 24 seconds to get The New York Times about an hour after Monday's crash. Performance improved by late morning.

CNN was getting 16 million page views an hour before noon. As of 3 p.m., it had more than 80 million page views for the day, three times the traffic of a week ago but less than the levels for the Sept. 11 period.

CNN spokeswoman Edna Johnson also said some visitors weren't able to get through during the first hour because of an internal glitch.