• by Masha Geller , August 18, 2003

The massive blackout on the east coast last week caused a 20-30% decline in online traffic, according to the latest data from comScore Networks.

According to the researchers, the weekday average over the last two months has been about 73 million PCs online, but during the power outage, even global Internet activity went down several points below average.

According to comScore, web activity began to return to near-normal levels around 6 a.m. on Friday, and some online news properties received a surge of traffic.

Reportedly, traffic to NYTimes.com, was up 13% on Sunday compared to the eight previous Sundays, and MSNBC.com and CNN.com registered 10-20% increases.

Reuters has also reported that about two-thirds of AOL members in areas hit by Thursday's blackout were unable to log onto the Internet service and that traffic to the AOL Time Warner-owned service fell 10% from normal traffic rates, to about 1.9 million simultaneous users.