The intensity of risk is so much that Randi Levin, chief technology officer for California’s largest city has send an email to two thousand city employees asking them to stop watching games online at work. “We are experiencing a high volume of traffic due to people watching the Olympics online” and it is affecting city operations, Levin said. Following the email, the employees have stopped watching the games online at office, which has returned the traffic to normal said Mark Wolf, executive officer at city’s information technology agency. “It had spiked about 20 percent,” Wolf told The Associated Press. “It was not enough to impact business applications, but it was enough to give us a nudge to see what it was. We looked into it and saw it was attributed to the Olympics video.” Though the situation is now under control but members of the city council are of the view that employees should not be allowed to watch games at work. They are not paid to watch the games. “City employees aren’t paid to watch the Olympics on their computers or TV. That is not what the taxpayers are paying them to do,” Councilman Dennis Zine told the Times. “The question is where are the supervisors when this is going on?” The situation is so intense that Jan Perry councilwoman has asked to block the streaming of the games in the City Hall computers. But the state government has made it clear that they are facing no such problems and that their employees come to work and not watch TV. “Our employees are here to work, not watch television, whether it’s on a city computer or their iPad or a television,” Darren Pudgil, spokesman for San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, told the AP. “If they are observed watching television, whether it’s the Olympics or Oprah, we’ll take appropriate action,” Pudgil said.
