So today was supposed to be a pretty normal Monday. I had a call at 10, I was going to finally fix that broken cron job I've been ignoring since Thursday, and then somewhere around lunch the internet just... stopped working. Not actually stopped, obviously, but try telling that to Fandango.
Advance tickets for The Force Awakens went on sale today and I am fairly sure I refreshed that checkout page more times in twenty minutes than I've refreshed anything in my entire life, cron job dashboards included. Fandango buckled. AMC's site buckled. Movietickets.com just gave up entirely and showed a blank white screen for a while, which is somehow worse than an error message because at least an error message tells you something is happening. I had four tabs open, all doing nothing, all spinning, and I just sat there like an idiot waiting for a theater seating chart to load.
Eventually I got in. Got two tickets for opening weekend, a little after 1pm my time, and honestly the relief was disproportionate to what actually happened, which is that I bought a movie ticket for a film that doesn't come out until December.
But heres the thing that bugs me and its been bugging me all afternoon: this keeps happening and nobody seems to plan for it. Every single time there's a predictable spike in demand, whether its concert tickets, a big Kickstarter, or a game launch on Steam, the infrastructure just falls over like its the first time anyone's ever seen traffic. We know the date. Fandango knew the date. They picked it, they announced it, they had weeks to prep servers for a surge that was 100% foreseeable, and the checkout flow still choked. I'm not saying its easy to provision for a spike like that, queueing systems and load balancing at that scale is genuinely hard, but "genuinely hard" and "we had zero advance warning" are two different excuses and only one of them applies here.
Anyway. I got my tickets. My brother did not, spent forty five minutes trying and gave up, so now he's annoyed at me in a very specific and unserious way that only siblings can pull off.
The trailer that ran on Monday Night Football last night is probably part of why this happened the way it did too, the timing wasn't an accident. Drop the trailer, let it get shared everywhere overnight, open ticket sales the next morning while everyone's still worked up about it. Its smart marketing even if it's rough on server load, and I'll admit it worked on me specifically, because I was not planning to buy tickets two months out until I saw that trailer twice in one evening.
One more thing before I forget, because it's genuinely one of my favorite dumb internet occasions: Back to the Future Day is Wednesday. October 21st, the actual date Marty and Doc land in when they travel forward in the second movie. I've seen people already posting their calendars set to "OCT 21 2015" like the dashboard readout in the DeLorean, and I'm sure by Wednesday my feeds are going to be an absolute flood of hoverboard jokes and self-lacing shoe takes. Pepsi's apparently doing a limited "Pepsi Perfect" bottle to tie in with it, which I only half believe is real until I see one in person. I'm looking forward to it in a way that feels a little silly to admit, but I don't care, I grew up on those movies and a made up future date getting this much attention two days from now is exactly the kind of nonsense the internet is good at.
Back to the cron job, which is still broken, and which feels a lot less exciting than any of this. It's an off-by-one error in a date comparison, I'm almost positive, I just haven't had the fifteen minutes today to actually go stare at it properly. Tomorrow, probably. Or Wednesday, if the hoverboard jokes don't eat the whole day first.