It appears that the national rail ( www.nationalrail.co.uk ) website has been down all morning, obviously, due to the bad weather across the country. You would imagine with bad weather during the years (wrong type of rain, leaves on the track, snow) that they would have expected this sort of traffic on their website during peak times.
$ dig www.nationalrail.co.uk
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.nationalrail.co.uk. 21381Â Â INÂ Â Â Â Â CNAMEÂ Â nationalrail.co.uk.
nationalrail.co.uk.    21381  IN     A      62.128.151.21$ dig -x 62.128.151.21
;; ANSWER SECTION:
21.151.128.62.in-addr.arpa. 28757 INÂ Â Â PTRÂ Â Â Â DETICA-LB.fm.netbenefit.co.uk.
Looks like netbenefit do some form of load balancing for the site/system, but, obviously it or the servers are not enough to cater for everyone trying to visit the site. Even connecting to port 80 with telnet is taking ages to connect now, probably, compacted by users refreshing the site in frustration as it does not load.
At least they have made an effort to load balance the site. Perhaps they should spend some of the money gained by ticket price increases on reliable/additional systems.
Their site is now telling me: “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request”. Probably not enough systems sitting behind the load balancers?