iTunes overwhelmed at Christmas
Cory Bergman December 27th, 2006
With gazillions of people armed with their new iPods and iTunes gift codes from the Holidays, the iTunes gift store periodically crashed on Monday and Tuesday, sometimes taking as long as 20 minutes to download a single song. Hitwise reported that four times as many people visited iTunes on Christmas this year compared to last year. Prediction: YouTube will see a bump in use, as well, with people uploading video from their brand new cameras. Although not nearly as much as iTunes.
6 Comments Add your own
1. Dan | December 27th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Nice problem to have , actually.
It’s relatively easy in the online world to scale up or down
your customer order processing.
Try that at Tower Records etc.
10 new employees today, laid off tomorrow?
5 new cash register stations? Put them where exactly?
Although I do miss going there.
Ah well . . . .
Dan
2. Chip Mahaney | December 27th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
For my 11-year-old son with a brand new Nano, the Christmas Day crashes on iTunes were no fun. But by this morning, everything appeared to be stable and functional again.
3. Tim | December 27th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Being a mainframe support guy, I have to point out that mainframes can handle web serving very well, and are absolutely built to handle large loads and scale well. The system I use (z/OS) comes with a workload manager and a web server that is WLM-enabled so that multiple instances of web server code can be started or stopped as load dictates.
Not that Apple would be caught dead using one, probably, but it could have saved them a lot of hassle.
4. Dan | December 27th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Tim,
I doubt it was a computing issue.
The bandwidth requirements were probably
way over the top, both incoming and outgoing.
And if I’m not mistaken, Apple doesn’t handle the
traffic themselves, it’s done by Akamai.
Dan
5. Safran | December 28th, 2006 at 6:05 am
Regardless of what the problem was, I still find this inexcusable. And nobody’s more of a Mac guy than I. There’s no excuse for a company (let alone a computer company) to have this sort of malfunction. Keep in mind that the average person doesn’t know about servers or Akamai or the like. Many probably thought there was a problem with their *own* computers. Causing annoyance and confusion at Christmas is a major misstep.
It happened to me several years ago when I purchased a TiVo. Couldn’t log in to register for days because they were overwhelmed. Nearly returned the thing.
6. Ratboy | January 19th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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