People are dying, and they are tracking hits

I just translated this from Fergana.ru. and added hyperlinks to the websites mentioned. It is somewhat appalling that they are counting hits while their correspondent is counting bodies, but I guess the statistics demonstrate that internet users in the outside world, at least, have not been as indifferent as world leaders:

The readership of Uzbek websites grew by several times on Friday
Ferghana.Ru, Security.uz, 14.05.2005 [07.14 MSK]

The number of visitors to Uzbek news websites grew by several times on Friday. In search of the latest information on the unrest in Andijan, internet users beseiged online publications, which were constantly updating their main pages.

The most popular informational-analytic website in the country, Ferghana.Ru, couldn't handle the flood of visitors, and was inaccessible for nearly three hours. According to data provided by the Russian company .masterhost, where the website is hosted, the number of requests to the server Friday morning was over 500 per second. This is reported by the Uzbek website Security.uz.

By 13.00 Tashkent time the site was restored - thanks to the efforts of the editors and the hosting provider it was moved to a different server, however the agency still had to ask users not to reload the main page of the site more than once every ten minutes.

The number of visitors to Ferghana.Ru, according to statistics from "Hotlog," on Friday totaled nearly 45 thousand, which is over six times greater than the number for Thursday (around 6200). And the number of page views on the site (hits) totaled over 405 thousand, compared to 32,800 on the previous day.

The Centrasia.org [same as Centrasia.ru - trans.] internet resource registered nearly 15 thousand visitors and 105 thousand hits on Friday, compared to 7500 visitors and 26,500 hits on Thursday.

The website of the National Information Agency of Uzbekistan (UzA), where official announcements about events were published, also distinguished itself, attracting approximately 4100 visitors, compared to 600 visitors on Thursday. The number of hits was over 14,000 (2,300 on the day before).

The website "Arena," specializing mostly on mass media activities, almost reached the same level of visitors as the independent publication TRIBUNE-uz. Thanks to timely airing of information on the events in Andijan, Arena was visited by approximately 1,370 people (4,770 hits) compared to fewer than 100 visitors (200 hits) on the day before. The number of visitors to TRIBUNE-uz was nearly 1,380 (7,500 hits) on Friday and around 500 (1,900 hits) on Thursday.

Therefore, the greatest growth in the number of visitors was registered by the "Arena" website - nearly 14-fold, and the smallest - by Centrasia.org - approximately twofold.