Flightradar App Goes Viral as Ukraine Crash Spawns Planespotters
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The downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17 over Ukraine has thrust a plane-tracking application into the limelight as more people study global flightpaths that previously only drew aviation enthusiasts and professionals.
The Flightradar24 app, which comes for free or as a paid service with more content, tops the charts of Apple Inc.’s app store in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands, the country that lost the most people in the crash. A 50-fold traffic increase to the company’s website has choked server capacity, forcing it to restrain some services to increase bandwidth.