Fun report about how the AAISP reacted to the sudden spike last night http://s.aa.net.uk/apost.cgi?incident=1260
Where I live in the U.S. the internet was very very slow last night. I wasn't even able to stream netflix and I have a 7mbps download /1mbps upload speed and no one else in my house was using the internet.
on virgin media (50Mbit) in the UK the updates through itunes at 6-9pm we painfully slow, I used the direct links I posted on the iOS5 board and had both updates in about 10mins, but as it turned out I didn't update straight away as I went out, when I got back at 1am the downloads took 3mins through itunes and the updates were painless so the servers must have settled down by then. none of the rest of the internet was slow just the updates through itunes were.
This is interesting, perhaps we will soon see a need to manage capacity for special events like they do for phone service at the moment. For example any call in event that expects a large number of phone calls is managed by the carriers to prevent bottlenecks in the main network by limiting capacity in the local networks. This event was really a double hit because not only were users downloading IOS5 but also doing Icloud backups. Perhaps it would have been wiser to stagger the two events.
I love the fact that iOS5 was basically all the internet traffic into the country for a good few hours!