OPRAH flattened the Internet Monday night.
The first of several heavily hyped live Webcasts featuring Oprah Winfrey and the author of her current book club pick crashed about 10 minutes into a promised, history-making 90-minute show.
Only a handful of viewers were able to see the entire event.
Most of the audience, estimated at more than 500,000 viewers, could only see the first few minutes before their screens froze.
“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” Winfrey told viewers at the beginning of the Oprah-cast.
“I’ve done a lot of exciting things in my life but I am most proud at how all of you have joined us in this global community,” she said shortly before the Web site crashed.
It was to be the first of 10 live Monday-night broadcasts with Oprah and Eckhart Tolle, author of the best-selling spiritual book, “A New Earth,” Winfrey’s latest Oprah Book Club selection.
Nearly 3,000 people left messages yesterday on Oprah’s Web site complaining about the screw up and expressing their frustrations.
“The broadcast kept freezing and sputtering and only caught a word here and there,” complained a fan going by the moniker, 4sandrella. “It was very frustrating and it only got worse as the broadcast went on.”
“After having waited so long for this. . . it was heartbreaking to have the screen freeze continuously and then finally stop with only an explanation that the network was experiencing technical difficulties,” wrote another fan, calenejd.
Officials at Harpo, Winfrey’s production company, issued an apology yesterday and promised that technicians were working to fix the problem.
“Harpo Productions, Inc. . . recognizes that interactive Internet broadcasting to a mass audience is still an emerging medium, and we’re proud to have been pioneers in pushing the industry forward.
“We deeply regret that some of our audience did not have an optimal viewing experience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
The Webcast was made available yesterday for replay on Oprah.com.
Internet industry experts blamed the crash on several factors, among them the inability of local Internet service providers to handle the traffic – much the same way local phone companies have trouble shouldering simultaneous phone calls when people try to vote for “American Idol.”