I was traveling in Europe the past couple of weeks. Early on in my travels we experienced a power related hardware failure on our oldest server. The old 2012 Dell desktop that powers most of the service. Thankfully, it was resolved quickly and we have a replacement ready to go for the new year. We had a very brief moment of downtime and I was looking forward to an uneventful end of the year. Unbeknownst to me, the Verizon – Cox dispute was ongoing and it interfered with the ability of people to watch Patriots games on Fox in Boston. Around Dec 27th we were covered in Boston.com . This appears to be the origin of the viral growth. In the 24 hours since this was posted, around 7k people signed up for the service and watched the Patriots game on Fox. In total there were just around 15k users streaming the game on game day.
All of the viewers used 40 Tb on data in a night.
New users used to register at the rate of 10-15 a day. We now see about 500 users sign up every day. As of Jan 2, we are at :
24408 users
30,404 devices
Prior to Dec 27 we had a total of 10k users signed up over the previous 2 years. More users signed up in the first 48 hours than the previous two years combined. Prior to this, our busiest day was the Patriots opener at 800 concurrent streams. On December 28th we successfully scaled up to 15k concurrent streams with no increased load on our servers (see green line above).