8:23 p.m.: Jay's sysops pager goes off. His wife says, "Uh oh, is it the dress?" He replies, "What dress?"
8:30 p.m.: I put the kids into their pajamas, brush their teeth, and hand them to my husband who puts them to bed. He says, "BuzzFeed keeps tweeting about a dress and I don't understand."
9:02 p.m.: Active visitors on the site reach 450,000, a new record. Jake, data science, delivers a screenshot of the previous record from February 2014.
PR is already pitching morning shows. This is also happening.
9:09 p.m.: When we hit 500,000 concurrent active visitors, I invite Samir, social media, to dev-chat to join in on the fun.
Samir explains how it happened.
"People were discussing it in the office, so I figured I would tweet it, and saw a HUGE click-through rate. I posted it as a photo on Facebook because I wasn't sure if it was something where you had to see the whole photo or not, but no one was clicking through at all. So I reposted as a link, watched it for a few minutes, not much engagement, deleted it. Twitter was doing so well, I decided to just post it again and saw it immediately rise in the live stats and get tons of comments on Facebook."