'They typically only made 10% or less of total bibs available for early registration. Don't think that could account for this level of catastrophe. I think the popularity of the anniversary caught them by surprise.
Does anyone have IT experience? Is it possible to have a temporary boost in servers or IT resources if there's only a few days a year with massive demand? Or is that unrealistic?
Yup. I'm an IT Program Manager. You can totally do this. Universities do it all the time because we have massive surge in web traffic on certain days/moments (in particular, the moment that everybody can find out whether they got in).
'They typically only made 10% or less of total bibs available for early registration. Don't think that could account for this level of catastrophe. I think the popularity of the anniversary caught them by surprise.
I think the early race week contributes heavily as well. More people can come down when kids are off school and they can build an extended period of vacation into their work schedule.
Yup. I'm an IT Program Manager. You can totally do this. Universities do it all the time because we have massive surge in web traffic on certain days/moments (in particular, the moment that everybody can find out whether they got in).
We do it constantly for things like Black Friday, Christmas, Mother's Day, etc. If the infrastructure is even remotely close to modern it's fairly trivial.