We've heard a lot from Niantic and The Pokemon Company about how Pokemon Go exceeded expectations, but just how unprepared were the people behind the game? About 50 times less prepared than they should've been, it turns out.
In a new post on the Google blog, Luke Stone, director of Customer Reliability Engineering at Google Cloud, shows exactly how ridiculous the traffic for Pokemon Go was at launch:
Stone writes that he and his team were tapped after Niantic launched the game in Australia and New Zealand, where the number of players exceeded the developer's expectations. "The teams targeted 1X player traffic, with a worst-case estimate of roughly 5X this target," Stone wrote. "Pokemon Go's popularity quickly surged player traffic to 50X the initial target, 10x the worst-case estimate."
Stone admitted this led to stability problems, which is probably why those of us playing the game at launch spent roughly 60% of our time loading the game, 20% cursing at a frozen screen, and 20% actually catching 'em all.
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