NASA engineer's made some public comments about the performance of the
network and web sites during the Mars Polar Lander event. Even without
any data from the lander, NASA used up much of its public bandwidth.
http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/1206/web-mars-12-08-99.html
I also heard from a couple of people about the problems I experienced
accessing the mars polar lander cache pages. Apparently there was an
operator error loading some of the information, leading to missing pages.
It was quickly corrected, but not before the bad links got out to the
mirrors.