When microsoft’s photosynth recently went down due to overwhelming traffic upon launch. They issued a response that was downright giddy:

With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady
ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most
optimistic expectations.

When Blabberize got Techcrunched at 5am I was scrambling. My buddy, Amit, of Pulse2.com fame woke me up with a call that went something like this:

Amit: “Good job getting on techcrunched!”
Me: “Wha? Who got techcrunched”
Amit: “You did numbnuts!”
Me: “I am on techcrunch?”
Amit: “WAKEUP! BLABBERIZE STUPID! Blabberize is on techcrunch!”
Me: “ARE YOU SERIOUS?!”
Amit: “Yes I’m serious! Go look at the front page”
Me: “Oh shit…. Our server is going do… I gotta go”
Amit: “Hell yea you do”

And from there I rolled out of bed and jumped on my computer and sshed into the server. I was looking at the requests and seeing my server slowly become more and more unresponsive. We were scrambling to keep up with the requests. It was big mess of scary and exciting wrapped up in a tight ball. Our user count was a meager 200 when that day started and ended with us in a couple thousand. We didn’t have the infrastructure for the growth at the time. Blabberize was really just a joke between me and some friends that we were working on turning into what we hoped was a big service.

During the day we were turning off features that were bogging down the database with requests to keep the system running. We had never dealt with a situation like it before. At the end of the day we still had a much higher traffic count then before. The days following we had other spikes but our server held up much better for those.

I guess I can see how microsoft could give a the giddy response. I just wouldn’t expect a major company like microsoft to have traffic load issues. It’s nice to see the excitment doesn’t go away weather you’re a small startup or a massive corperation.