A record number of people have watched the inauguration ceremony of U.S. President Barack Obama online, with many news websites beating their traffic records.

The photo taken on Jan. 20, 2009 shows the Capitol building in Washington D.C., capital of the United States. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony is to be held here on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Zhang Yan)

Akamai’s competitor Limelight said 2.5 million people watched the inauguration on sites that use Limelight for delivery, with most of the viewers staying for Obama’s entire speech.

By 3:30 EST on Tuesday, CNN.com had served more than 21.3 million live video streams, smashing its Election Day record of 5.3 million streams, according to data from CNN.com. The site also said it served more than 1.3 million simultaneous streams at its peak, during Obama’s inaugural address. The website had to place some viewers on a “wait list” for a while before they could view the live stream.

MSNBC.com also posted a strong performance, delivering more than 14 million video streams by 1 p.m. EST. The site had logged more than 80 million page views by that time.

The huge number of video viewers appears to have slowed down the Internet as a whole. Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks website performance, said the Internet’s top 40 sites slowed down by as much as 60 percent when the ceremony started at 11 a.m., and many news sites saw even sharper declines in performance.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet