The US strike against Iraq led to a jump in traffic on the Internet, which is expected to become the major source of information on the conflict for many people.
ireland.comsaw a 400 per cent increase in traffic when news broke at approximately 3.25 a.m.
But the limited nature of the assault, and the timing of the strike - which came late yesterday evening in the United States when many Americans were at home watching television rather than in front of their computers at work - meant that fears of Internet gridlock and outages appeared to be unfounded.
Yahoo!'s news site saw about three times more traffic than it would in a typical hour directly after President George W. Bush told Americans in a speech that the US had begun a war on Iraq, according to a Yahoo! spokeswoman.
She said Web surfers were also using more targeted searches after Mr Bush's speech. The top search terms on Yahoo! in the 15 minutes after the speech were: "Iraq," "George W. Bush," "world map," "Ari Fleischer," "Saddam Hussein" and "war," she said.
Mr Dean Wright, editor-in-chief of the Internet arm of cable news network MSNBC, said traffic was running at two to two-and-a-half times normal levels after the war started.
He said in the next few days the website would focus on people at work who have high-speed connections by including a live video television stream.
Over the last couple days, the search for news of the threat of war drove many Americans to the Web. The 15 top news sites had an average 41 per cent more traffic on Tuesday than their daily average over the previous four weeks, according to Comscore Media Metrix.