Information about fatal Tech shooting spreads over Internet while cell phone lines downed

| 04.17.2007 | 07:14:4311608 |

April 17 '07: Students, faculty and residents in Roanoke, Virginia said that as the news of the fatal school shootings began to creep out of the Virginia Tech campus, cell phone lines were completely shut down by the sheer volume of demand and that email was incredibly slow or not working the Roanoke Times reported. While cell phones lines struggled to remain open, information via the Internet became the single source of news.

A spokesman for Verizon Wireless told the Times, "We were seeing a 300 percent increase over a normal busy time - four times the number of calls during the busiest period."

Lisa Sedlak, a Blacksburg Community Relations officer told the Times, that while trying to reach her husband, who works in the building where the second round of fatal shootings took place, "Tech's email was down and the cellphone service was slow."

To help spread information about the shooting and the casualties, many students began to post information on their Facebook or Myspace websites. One computer systems engineer, William Dunn, began to post up-to-date information using Fark.com - a website usually dedicated to odd or amusing stories.