7 minute read

This Sunday, over 100 million viewers will watch the Super Bowl. Whether they’re catching the match-up between the Falcons and the Patriots, or there for the commercials between the action, that’s a lot of eyeballs—and that’s only counting America. But all that attention doesn’t just stay on the screen, it gets directed to the web, and if you’re not prepared curious visitors could be rewarded with a sad error page.

The Super Bowl makes us misty-eyed because our first big flash sale happened in 2007, after the Colts beat the Bears. Fans rushed online for T-shirts celebrating the win, giving us a taste of what can happen when a flood of people convene on one site in a very short duration of time. Since then, we’ve been continually levelling up our ability to handle flash sales, and our merchants have put us to the test: on any given day, they’ll hurl Super Bowl-sized traffic, often without notice.

Emil Stolarsky