Online daily malaysiakini 's video section, malaysiakini.tv had experienced a downtime following a dramatic increase in traffic to the site since the Ijok by-election last Saturday.

According to malaysiakini.tv system developer, Aizu Ikmal Ahmad, the sudden increase of traffic to the site has led to the server to become unstable even a few days before the polling day.

"Our bandwidth and server resource can only support up to 1,000 concurrent streaming viewers but few days before the polling day, the concurrent viewers surged to five times of what we could support.

"This caused the server to become slow and unstable, and subsequently led to the viewers facing difficulties to access malaysiakini.tv ," he said.

However, Aizu said his team was in the process of upgrading the server - which led to a downtime since yesterday morning at about 10am - to accommodate the increase of traffic volume.

"We advise the viewers to be patient and come back to visit the site tonight after the upgrading process is expected to be completed," he added.

However viewers did not have to wait that long as normal services resumed at about 4pm.

More to come

Malaysiakini.tv became a favourite among viewers for its coverage of the by-election.

On election day, it played clips of two buses allegedly ferrying phantom voters into Ijok. The clips also included the tensed moments outside several polling stations last Saturday.

"I believe that after what have been reported over the alleged irregularities and unfairness in the Ijok by-election, readers and viewers are trying to find out for themselves on what they have read.

"These video clips allow them to see and judge for themselves whether it has been a free and fair election," said malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.

Premesh added that the 20 video clips - some exclusively recorded by malaysiakini.tv - that appeared on the site have received extremely good responses.

"We will upload few more clips and we hope our viewers will continue to visit the site," he said.

The video site hit a high of 50,044 views on the eve of the by-election while malaysiakini's news website delivered 1.58 million pageviews to an estimated 160,000 visitors on the polling day.