Right in the middle of the Great Egg Hunt, something went terribly wrong and our dedicated hunters were caught out in the cold. So what happened?

At 8:04pm, just after dinner for lots of folks, the monitoring system in our web servers’ traffic load balancers triggered an alert which cause all web traffic—everyone accessing the website at that moment—to be diverted to just one server. That server, like a 4-wheeler trying to pull an entire train, couldn’t handle the load. The website went down.

Fortunately, our wonderful community, along with our other monitoring systems, sent us numerous alerts and we began looking into the issue immediately. Though we figured out what was happening right away, it took a couple tries to eliminate the issue.

We ultimately had to stop and restart the web servers on each machine one-by-one, which caused the web traffic to cut out intermittently. Eventually, we found the issue and the website stabilized!

Fear not! We have added extra precautions now!

We’ve set up two additional monitoring systems. These systems monitor our website from an amazing 61 different points around the Earth.

So everything should be smooth from here on out, since it’s all back to normal as far as we can tell. Of course, the Great Egg Hunt is back on, and if anything goes wrong, please let us know!

Thanks for your patience, everyone!