Malaysian plane virtual search party too much for website

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A digital mapping company that allowed web surfers around the world to hunt the vast ocean waters for the vanished Malaysian jetliner crashed on Tuesday after an overwhelming response.

Colorado-based Digital Globe has trained its five satellites on the Gulf of Thailand region?the last known whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. The orbital units transmit photos and data of the vast area which viewers can scan on a website called Tomnod-- Mongolian for ?Big Eye.? The hope is that millions of sets of eyes, with an assist from above, can help solve the mystery of what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board.

But a day after the initial images were posted online, the site required emergency maintenance to handle the large virtual search party.

?It?s a good reason to have our site crash,? a spokesperson for DigitalGlobe told FoxNews.com. ?We did get an overwhelming amount of people responding. It has been going well. We are getting a lot of tags and will be uploading more images for people to search.?

Once the site is back up, any computer user can log onto Tomnod and pore through thousands of high-definition images of a particular region and publicly "geotag" anything that raises suspicion. A computer algorithm is then used to determine whether certain areas are tagged more than others, and in-house experts follow any leads from the consensus tagging.

 

?We have had six million map views. Half-a-million people have signed up, it?s a 100 times the response we?ve had before.?

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