I just have to ask why this is news? Is this really something newsworthy?
Cambridge's network probably isn't as hardened to spikes in traffic since they don't get much traffic. But still, it isn't 1995. They should have some form of load balancing or distributed/clustered web/data/file systems to handle temporary spikes in traffic and data requests. Serving simple static data isn't something that should "crash the site".
The technology behind the repository itself is not great. (DSpace[1]), add to that the factor that it is not actually build to handle this many requests and scaling quickly is out of the question too because of the server set up.
Even without issues, it often felt a bit sluggish when serving locally. The pages are quite large, and the whole pipeline from content -> webpage is rather tedious.(Java, XSLT -> html)
It shouldn't have happened - but I assumed it would.
Cambridge's network probably isn't as hardened to spikes in traffic since they don't get much traffic. But still, it isn't 1995. They should have some form of load balancing or distributed/clustered web/data/file systems to handle temporary spikes in traffic and data requests. Serving simple static data isn't something that should "crash the site".