History DemandOverload / WebOriginal

* Pick a UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} seasonal game sale. Any of them. It will most likely begin with a server overload.

* Meijer's site experienced a surge in traffic on Thanksgiving Day because of the announcement that they would have the UsefulNotes/PlayStation5 for in-store pickup on Black Friday 2020. [[https://twitter.com/FunkoPops25/status/1332177689860562945?s=20 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.

* On January 23, 2024, ‘’Website/{{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.

* On January 27, 2024, [[https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1751285816918196241?s=20 AMC's website]] crashed upon the release of tickets for ''Film/DunePart2''.

** [=DeviantArt=] crashed on January 23, 2023 for unknown reasons.

** 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). 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.

** When it was announced that Betty Wright died on May 10, 2020, many people went on Google to check out the news [[SpellMyNameWithAnS because they had thought]] Creator/BettyWhite 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.

** Google also crashed due to a combination of the virtual PSAT exam on January 26, 2021 and a major Verzion outage in the Northeast.

** 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 [[BigBlackout power outages]] or maintenence-induced downtime.

** This isn't new to them: ''WebAnimation/RedVsBlue'' had both the Rooster Teeth website ''and'' [[Website/BlipTv the 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:

* In late May of 2022, [[https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini 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 WebVideo/{{Vinesauce}} and LetsPlay/{{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.

* In late May of 2022, [[https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini 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 WebVideo/{{Vinesauce}} and LetsPlay/{{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).

* Website/TVTropes nearly ran into this during Administrivia/TheGoogleIncident.

* During the {{UsefulNotes/coronavirus}} pandemic, Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} went down at least once due to too many people trying to look up information on the pandemic, [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness something that rarely happens]]. The only previous cases of this happening were with Music/MichaelJackson's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-06-29/News_and_notes death eleven years prior]] and UsefulNotes/KobeBryant's death shortly before the pandemic reached the US.