As early as 1997, there was the landing of the Pathfinder on Mars. The Sojourner rover's pictures were looked up by tens of millions of people, an enormous number back then. NASA did prepare by creating mirror sites, but still, in France, there was a request by the government to cut down on the site visits: the phone lines were overloading.
The Brewing Network had a huge influx of downloads the last time Lunch Meet was uploaded, disrupting download of the shows that make money, to the amazement of Justin. the BN in general has download limits, with Justin pointing out that the daily limit is greater than 24 hours of content, so people hitting 'download all' should calm down.
This has happened a lot in the past to Dragon Cave during new releases and/or holidays.
Disney+, the streaming service by Disney, had a lot of hype around it. There must have been a lot more people interested than initially expected, however, because the moment the service launched, people exceeded the demand expectations and caused the servers to crash. Some tech experts suggest otherwise, pointing the finger at authentication measures that were poorly implemented.
Disney+ suffered technical issues on January 23, 2021 due to too many people trying to watch UFC 257.
The service also crashed on February 19, 2021 due to the seventh episode of WandaVision and the addition of The Muppet Show.
On March 11, 2022, the service displayed error messages for those trying to watch Turning Red.
Apple iTunes servers crashed on Christmas and Boxing Day the year the iTunes gift cards were introduced due to how many people were getting them as gifts and trying to use them immediately. People were calling their Internet Service Providers trying to figure out why they couldn't get to this one site in particular.
When Mark started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his Mark Watches site, the onslaught of Buffy fans broke the server multiple times before Mark had to get a new one to accommodate for them.
Netflix is the largest single user of bandwidth in the world, to the point where much of the Net Neutrality debate is concerned with attempts by ISPs to throttle it and/or force it to pay them directly for the bandwidth its users take up.
The Simpsonize Me website that was launched concurrently with The Simpsons Movie saw so much traffic during its early life on the internet that it frequently saw downtime. The fact that the site also utilized high-quality animated graphics didn't help either.
Mozilla's servers went down due to the volume of people downloading Mozilla Firefox 3.0 when it came out.
This happened when German gaming blog gameone.de did a walkthrough of Deadly Premonition. After approximately 10 parts had been uploaded, the walkthrough became so popular that every new uploaded part made the site unresponsive for hours.
Pick a Steam seasonal game sale. Any of them. It will most likely begin with a server overload.
This is probably why they don't do free weekends as often. When a game in high demand gets picked, anyone who buys the game will have to wait on Monday to play it because the authentication servers get backed up.
Pick any major Fan Convention. The registration site will likely crash within the first few minutes or seconds of opening up.
The San Diego Comic-Con website had been overloaded with visitors hoping to snatch up passes to the big event in recent years, resulting in a waiting room approach in 2012. When many people complained it was still difficult to log on in time due to overwhelming demand, they switched to a slightly different approach: a pre-waiting room leading to one based completely on lottery in hopes of leveling the field. While the latter pleased people who lucked out and got in (it helped to network with people willing to register 2 other friends), people who were able to manage the old system but got shafted by the new one were nonplussed.
The San Jose, California-based FanimeCon historically had a rash of site crashes the moment they open up hotel reservations, causing people to be screwed over and often end up at hotels far away from the convention center (with complimientary shuttle service to accomodate them, but depending on one's planned activities or needs this can be highly problematic as opposed to getting a hotel within walking distance). In the mid-2010's, they tried a new approach in which only registered attendees can book rooms and rooms are sold in blocks that are based on when the user registers, with earlier registrants getting rooms sooner.
The release of the final step of There she is!! crashed SamBakZa's website.
Notorious gossip forum Kiwi Farms crashed after Sonichu author Christine Weston Chandler admitted to (and was subsequently arrested for) committing incest with their mother.
Releases of new episodes of RWBY nearly always caused a significant server overload, to the point where the entire Rooster Teeth website was unavailable for 20-30 minutes after the release. Before the premiere of the first episode of Volume 4, RT invested in new servers, supposedly 4 times more powerful than the previous ones... and the fans managed to crash them anyway when the episode landed. Averted as of Volume 5, as their new new servers appear to be stable.
This isn't new to them: Red vs. Blue had both the Rooster Teeth website andthe entire video service crashing as Season 8 premiered. And way back in the first episodes, there was a case that crossed with the "Crashed due to popularity" case, as the server that Burnie brought to work was downright eating most of the bandwidth there, culminating in:
RoosterTeeth.com user: What was the moment you knew RvB had taken off? Burnie Burns: When our server could not handle being linked by three major sites at one time. I went from thinking "how do I get people to watch this" to "I need to find a way to allow people to watch this"
In a combination of this and "physical copy went out of stock," the Massdrop inaugural group buy for the Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones, a custom and Massdrop-exclusive version of the Sennheiser HD 650 selling for about a third of the 650's MSRP which had been met with immense hype after the page for the group buy went up about a week prior by Massdrop, was so popular that it caused the website to hang hard when the ordering period started, and even when the site stabilized many users could not buy the headphones before the 5,000-unit limit hit because the site could not process their payments. Those who were among the first to try to pay but were denied the transaction later got a second chance through email, but only for a limited time.note The second chances were due to some users getting duplicate charges, causing the site to erroneously inflate the number of orders taken; Massdrop staff had to take time to manually remove duplicate orders.
Tends to happen anytime a major tragedy or disaster occurs. For example, during September 11th, people trying to find out what was happening crashed many major news sites and phone lines were jammed with people calling friends and/or relatives to see if they were OK. It also happened during the 2003 Northeast blackout and major hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy.
This can even happen before a hurricane occurs, too: on August 4, 2020, many people concerned about the landfall of Hurricane Isaias crashed Facebook and Twitter to see where the hurricane was.
This tends to happen to Amazon.com during their annual Prime Day event.
The Japanese Amazon website crashed on May 25, 2020 because of the site suddenly getting in a massive amount of Nintendo Switches, something that was in short supply due to the COVID-19 pandemic keeping people at home.
Reddit has crashed too many times to count. Probably the most famous crash was in reaction to the "Sweet Victory" controversy at Super Bowl LIII, when the site was stormed by angry SpongeBob SquarePants fans.
YouTube went down for a few hours when the Jonas Brothers' music video for "Cool" got uploaded because too many people were trying to watch it.
YouTube went down for a few hours on December 14, 2020 due to problems at Google caused by too many people trying to log onto their services on the last day of the fall semester for most students in the United States.
Google crashed on September 16, 2019 from a combination of Ric Ocasek's cause of death being announced and the release of Super Nintendo Entertainment System control pads that are compatible with the Nintendo Switch (see "Physical copy ran out" for more information on the latter).
When the names of the victims of the fatal helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant were released online on January 27, 2020, so many people Googled it that not only did the server go down for an hour, but it also caused Google Drive to go down. It also might have played a hand in causing the Google Maps API to break down for two weeks on sites that utilized the service for their maps.
When it was announced that Betty Wright died on May 10, 2020, many people went on Google to check out the news because they had thought Betty White had died, causing both Google and Twitter to crash. Averted upon the death of the real Betty White in 2021, as the servers managed to stay up.
On December 14, 2020, Google crashed as a result of too many people trying to log onto their services on the last day of the fall semester for most students in the United States, which created authentication issues across all their platforms, including YouTube.
Google also crashed due to a combination of the virtual PSAT exam on January 26, 2021 and a major Verizon outage in the Northeast.
On July 8, 2022, too many people looking up Olivia Newton-John's death crashed the Google servers.
When it was announced that Idris Elba had tested positive for coronavirus, Twitter, Reddit and Discord went down due to fans sharing the news.
Similarly, the Internet Archive displayed demand messages about too many links being archived during the pandemic, probably due to people archiving reputable sources on the situation to use in the future, which also rarely happens on the server, save for the site going down due to power outages or maintenance-induced downtime.
Microsoft's OneDrive service often goes down during the times that college students have midterms and final exams.
Sine the COVID-19 pandemic had some places around the world require citizens to wear a face mask, craft site Etsy, as well as eBay and the website for JoAnn, went down several times during said period due to people buying masks and/or supplies to make them.
Both Apple Music and Spotify went down upon the release of JUICE WRLD's last album.
Similar to the Kobe Bryant example, whenever updates on the disappearance and eventual death of Naya Rivera were posted, Twitter and Google would often crash. One such update note The one where her son was found wound up not just crashing those two sites, but the cell services of AT&T and Verizon.
Fandom (formerly Wikia) crashed when it was announced that Tenet got delayed another time on July 20, 2020.
It also went down on November 3, 2020 due to Election Day-related activities.
Fandom also went down on October 18, 2021 due to a combination of several Marvel films having their release dates re-scheduled and the announcement of the death of Colin Powell.
It also went down on February 17, 2022 due to the announcement that Stranger Things would end after its fifth season.
Fandom experienced a series of outages and general technical issues on March 1, 2024 for unknown reasons, causing wikis to go into read-only mode.
Reddit and Facebook both crashed when the release of Moesha on Netflix was announced.
Utility sites often get overloaded with demand whenever Big Blackouts occur. This is usually seen in ones that are induced by hurricanes.
The popularity of video conferencing lead to this happening a lot on Zoom in 2020, usually during the 12PM EST hour. On August 24, 2020, which was the first day of school for many students, the service crashed as a result of too many school districts using the service to conduct their classes.
On September 7, 2020, the release of SHINee's Taemin music video for "Criminal" caused Tumblr to crash for an hour as excited fans discussed it.
Tumblr also crashed (albeit for only 18 minutes) when the Latin American dub of Supernatural made the one-sided "Destiel" ship explicitly two-sided.
Meijer's site experienced a surge in traffic on Thanksgiving Day because of the announcement that they would have the PlayStation 5 for in-store pickup on Black Friday 2020. It got to the point where the website displayed a wait time of 6 years because four million people were on the site at once with the same purpose.
In a smaller example, 506sports, which lists the National Football League games to be broadcast in different areas of the United States, is often slow to load during NFL gamedays as people try to see what games they can watch that day.
When Wonder Woman 1984 came out on HBO Max on December 25, 2020, so many people tried to watch it that errors were displayed when one attempted to watch the film. It got to the point where some viewers who were already watching the film got the same errors halfway through their viewing of the movie.
DeviantArt crashed on January 20, 2021 due to activities relating to the United States presidential inauguration. This caused search query results to be empty.
This also happened on July 10th, 2021, when The Owl House fans crashed the server after an episode aired that day featuring a scene involving a same-sex kiss.
DeviantArt went down for about an hour on January 23, 2023 for unknown reasons.
On May 4, 2021, Disney Store's website displayed a virtual waiting room page due to the release of new Star Wars products.
On June 2, 2021, Butch Hartman's streaming service Oaxis crashed on launch day because of too many people (particularly fans of his cartoons) wanting to view the service.
When the second season of The Owl House was added to Disney NOW, the service displayed error messages as a result of too many people trying to watch it.
Crunchyroll crashed on January 8, 2022 due to fans of Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure trying to watch episode 43. It then crashed the next day with the release of the final season of Attack on Titan.
Spotify and Discord crashed on March 8, 2022 due to the birthday of Suga of BTS.
When it was announced that Stan Lee died, many went on Facebook and Twitter to see the news for themselves, causing the websites to crash.
A similar multi-website crash occurred when Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars, died, crashing websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even Microsoft's servers.
In late May of 2022, DALL-E Mini (later renamed Craiyon), an open source version of the DALL-E image generation software, started getting a lot of attention from YouTubers such as Vinesauce and Markiplier, as well as from forum threads on Reddit, 4chan, and elsewhere. This resulted in the "Too much traffic, please try again" message popping up very often for people trying to make images with it, and even those who could get their prompts to go through would have to wait several minutes for the images to be complete (before that point, images could generate in as little as 12 seconds). A similar process would play out repeatedly with other programs like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney during the big text-to-image generator boom of 2022.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 experienced a demand-induced outage when the flight carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II went into the air. Close to 6 million people tried to track the flight, shattering the site's previous record of about 2.2 million.
After Mozilla discontinued Firefox support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users, Mozilla's Support website displayed a 502 Server Error page on July 7, 2023, likely as a result of too many people trying to transfer their data to new devices.
The Art Fight website, used for a month-long annual art challenge, always lags a massive amount and sometimes throws errors during the first couple of days of the event due to high server load.
On January 23, 2024, Neopets suffered an overload the moment its scheduled maintenance concluded due to multiple users attempting to login to do their dailies and check out the then-new Styling Studio update all at once.
, pointing the finger at authentication measures that were poorly implemented.