The Denver Broncos weren’t the only ones delivering an overwhelming blitz during Sunday’s Super Bowl.
An onslaught of web traffic struck hard at the web site for Beyonce, which was down well past midnight for those who wanted to try and score tickets for her tour, announced just after her halftime show performance.
Dynatrace, a web analytics company, monitored the websites of major advertisers and celebrities who had substantial airtime during the game to anticipate a surge in web traffic. By and large most held firm, while a few others had some brief downtime but were able to recover.
Beyonce(.com) Wasn’t Ready for This
The most high-profile site to down down for an extended period of time belonged to Beyoncé.
The singer’s site went down shortly after halftime and remained unavailable well past midnight.
The deluge of traffic came from her halftime performance and announcement of a forthcoming tour. According to the Dynatrace metrics, Beyoncé’s site had a number of HTTP 5xx errors, which indicated a server side problem.
Another site to take a major hit was Axe.com.
The desktop site for the popular men’s body spray maker had critical performance issues after its commercial aired, but the mobile site was able to remain afloat.
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DeathWishCoffee.com also has some bumpy performance, but was able to recover after some brief downtime. QuickenLoans.com saw some sluggishness after its commercial aired, but in general recovered fine just afterwards.
Audi, Heinz, Others Stand Strong
Other websites, however, were able to keep things up and running despite the burst of traffic. Dynatrace specifically called out the web sites for Audi, Heinz and MobileStrikeApp as having the top three response times among those monitored.
Additionally, the web site for Jack-in-the-Box was able to withstand a major strike after the company offered up a million burgers for free (much to the chagrin of those Chick-fil-A, no doubt). Honda, Wix and Coca-Cola were among other top performers given their ability to deliver a response time of less than four seconds, which is a good effort for such a high-traffic day.
With the exception of the mega-star Beyonce, the web teams for many of the top brands had a pretty good day.
The research by Dynatrace indicates that the sites properly prepped for the game and anticipated a traffic surge. That’s the key to keeping a strong uptime and should serve as a good object lesson for those who want to embark on the lucrative, but expensive, world of Super Bowl advertising.
A 30-second advertisement was expected to cost upwards of $5 million or more to air during the game.