Hitting ‘Star Wars’ Site at Warp Speed

Since LucasFilm Ltd. unveiled the movie trailer for the first “Star Wars” prequel last week, its official Web site for “Episode 1: The Phantom Menace” (https://www.starwars.com/episode-i) has been flooded with people trying to download a copy.

The traffic has been so intense--as many as 400 hits a second--that the studio’s Internet service provider has had to expand the company’s pipe from 70 to nearly 81 T-1 lines, LucasFilm officials said.

“As of Friday morning, we’ve had about 400,000 people get a copy of the trailer from our site,” said Marc Hedlund, director of Internet development for LucasFilm. “We knew it was going to be popular, but I’m still surprised at the reaction.”

But copies of the two-minute clip are circulating all over the World Wide Web, both official and bootleg versions taken by people who sneaked cameras into theaters. Many of these clips are housed at fan sites such as TheForce.Net (https://www.TheForce.net) or Dark Horizons (https://www.darkhorizons.com), where thousands of people gather to speculate about plot lines and swap insider gossip.