17.13 Public reports, not our clients
These are published accounts from news organisations and from the companies or agencies themselves. They are not Ravindra's clients and not example.com. We do not invent their architecture or a server count they did not publish.
Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift, November 2022. On 15 November 2022 the Eras Tour presale drew a crowd that Reuters described as crashing the site in places: periodic outages, long waits, and Ticketmaster saying it had intermittent issues and historically unprecedented demand. Ticketmaster's own note said the onsale made 3.5 billion system requests, about four times its previous peak, that some sales were slowed to stabilise the systems, and that about 15% of interactions had problems. The Associated Press and the BBC reported that the public sale was then cancelled, citing extraordinarily high demand and not enough tickets left. A sale spike. Not a claim about one server or about auto scaling inside Ticketmaster.
Pokémon GO, July 2016. The game opened in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States on 6 July 2016, and players could not reliably stay connected. On 8 July 2016 the official Pokémon GO account said they were fixing server issues and would continue the country rollout soon. Niantic's CEO told Business Insider the international rollout was paused until they were comfortable with server capacity. Google's account of the launch says traffic in the first countries surged past expectations within about 15 minutes. The public fact is that prepared capacity was behind the crowd.
HealthCare.gov, October 2013. The U.S. site opened on 1 October 2013. The Government Accountability Office (GAO-15-238) wrote that the systems launched without adequate capacity, with software errors and missing pieces, and that people met slow pages, errors, and outages. A Department of Health and Human Services progress report said that for some weeks that October the site was down an estimated 60 percent of the time, and it named both software defects and insufficient hardware. Capacity was part of the failure. It was not the only part.
Say the year and who reported it. Do not add an instance type, an Auto Scaling group, or a server count that the report did not give you.
Lab
Chala, one public report only.
- Pick Ticketmaster in November 2022, Pokémon GO in July 2016, or HealthCare.gov in October 2013.
- Write the year.
- Write who reported it (Reuters, Ticketmaster, the Pokémon GO account, Business Insider, Google, the GAO, or the health department report).
- Write what users could not finish.
- Write one sentence you will not add: their instance types, their Auto Scaling settings, or a server count they did not publish.