The Apple Store - dealing with traffic spikes from a product launch

In an earlier post our colleague TheOpsMgr discussed how the online gambling sites dealt with the traffic spikes from the Grand National (http://theopsmgr.seriticonsulting.com/2010/04/grand-national-effect-dealing-with.html).

Sadly it looks like no-one at the Apple Store in the UK read it and paid the price when they launch the new iPhone 4 in the UK today (which has received some coverage over at The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/15/apple_store_dead/).

Not a great user experience, and not a great PR success either!

You can see from the graph below the morning's events.

At 6am a holding page was put up whilst they upgraded the site and then at 9am all hell broke loose as the customer's hit the store to pre-order their iPhones. Response times are still fluctuating 3 hours later.

The lessons are the usual ones - load test before you launch, have dynamic capacity and/or use a lighter weight site under heavy load