How Kayne West crashed our startup!

I was quietly sipping my coffee when the #server channel on Slack alerted us that all our servers servers reached 100% capacity. Impossible: a fresh batch of brand new servers went online just a month ago.

100 times more sessions that normal

I quickly checked our systems and couldn’t believe my eyes. I had to go to Google Analytics to confirm what I was seeing: there were 3,000 open sessions in our site… instead of 30! Our servers sputtered and crashed as I was rubbing my eyes.

Our startup gets a steady traffic from Google searches so this was totally unexpected. We panicked as we thought we had been hacked. New users were coming from all around the world without any obvious pattern so clearly not a foul play. We resorted to adding more servers online to deal with the tsunami.

Our webpage monitoring startup

Our startup is a webpage monitoring service called Visualping. It alert users when selected parts of any website changes. It is used to get alerted when prices drop, concert tickets become available, deals are announced, new jobs are posted, new houses get listed, out-of-stock becomes available etc.

OMG: It’s all Kayne West’s fault…!!??

It didn’t take long to realize what was happening by checking what our users were doing with our system: As the screenshot below shows:

95% of the monitoring request were related to Adidas Yeezy Boost sneakers!

Kayne West had just announced the global release of the sneakers, on a first come, first served basis on the Adidas site and other sites for the next day, Friday Feb 19th.

The internet had gone wild over Kayne’s shoes!

CG recommended to check adidas.com/yeezy repeatedly, as the online store will open at an unexpected time. Racked outlined the list of stores where the sneakers will be available and Bustle went to great lengths to recommend alternatives for those unlucky fellows that would miss them.

It’s over now…

Soon ‘sold out’ postings, as the one below, filled the different pages that people were watching. As the buying frenzy ended, we were left with a ton of spare capacity. We also had a compassionated thought for all those smashed screens and keyboards around the world, also part of Kayne’s shoes release collateral damage.

And the frustration might be understandable. Hollywood life reported that the sneakers were sold out in minutes when they were first released mid 2015 and that ended up in eBay for $10,000 a pair.

Despite the smashed screens, there were some happy endings. The Chrome store rating caption below shows one of our happy users were able to get their hand on the Yeezy Boost sneakers. Congrats Khalil!

On our end, we’ve decided to keep our the servers just in case. We’ve also added an alert system that watches for any shoe related announcement made by Kanye.