A huge traffic surge in response to a story broken by the NYTimes.com alleging New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a client of a high-end prostitution ring, caused the newspaper website to crash yesterday.

According to Huffingtonpost.com, the website went offline for a period yesterday afternoon as readers raced to read allegations about the governor.

NYT spokesperson Diane McNulty told Huff Post that between 2-4 pm (Eastern US time) traffic was 60 per cent higher than at the same time last Monday. NYT mobile almost doubled its traffic for the same period.

Considering the amount of traffic that would have been generated by last week’s primaries for the Democratic candidate, yesterday must have been a pretty heavy day.