The Torch Is Fired Up
Despite the monumental setbacks, the Olympics sites went live on November 19, 2001, the same day that Olympics officials went to Olympia, Greece to light the ceremonial torch. The sites were developed under budget and on time, said Corrigan, successes he attributes largely to constant and intensive testing.
Although a great deal of pre-games content was already online, MSNBC.com and the SLOC continued to add new articles and biographies to the sites from November 2001 until February 2002. They tested the live feed of the results data during November and December. The results system came online just one week before the start of the games.
They continued to upgrade the infrastructure with servers, load balancers, and caching systems, and MSNBC.com also expanded into its second data center. At the end of December 2001, the group performed a final security sweep and lockdown of the site, searching for possible vulnerabilities to hackers, viruses, and other threats.
Finally, after eight months of pushing to get the sites, the infrastructure, the communication, and the back-up processes ready, the MSNBC.com team was ready for the Olympics. Friday morning, February 8, 2002 was an early day for the MSNBC team. By 6 a.m. most members were at work, nervously awaiting the first results from the K90 ski jump qualifying round, until the organizers rescheduled the event for February 10.
"[The cancellation] was a letdown for the team," says Corrigan. "Everyone wanted to see the results system working in real time from Salt Lake, because if it didn't work it would be a significant blow to the site. Even though it had been tested many times, this was the real thing, with real time results, and no margin for error."
Everyone sat and waited and watched throughout the day. "There were teams in the data centers, teams in the Global Operations Center, teams down in Salt Lake, and teams in Redmond all watching intently to see what would happen," says Corrigan.
The traffic started to ramp up on Friday night with the opening ceremonies, but the staff was still nervous about the weekend, when the first real results would come in. On Saturday morning, most of the teams were in again by 6 a.m. to see how the results systems would work and watch for any other problems that might arise. At 7 a.m. the results started flowing. They were accurate, fast, and on the site in 15 seconds. The group breathed "a huge, collective sigh of relief," notes Corrigan.
The Finish Line
Before and during the Winter Games, fans accessed the Olympics sites in record-breaking numbers, making the sports sites the most highly trafficked in history. Combined, they received 716 million page views in February and 19.7 million unique visitors over the 17 days of the Olympics. Usage for a single day peaked on February 21 at 8.8 million unique visitors and 74 million page views.
Metrics provider Keynote Systems noted periods of poor performance and unavailability on several other Olympics-related sites. For instance, the United States Olympic Committee (www.usoc.org) site had performance problems following Apolo Ohno's short-track speed-skating wipeout on February 16. Five days later, the site went down for nine hours as 16,000 emails protesting South Korean Kim Dong-Sung's short-track speed-skating disqualification rolled in.
The MSNBC sites were often battered at these times, too. Data compiled by webHancer indicates that on February 12, the traffic at Olympics.com increased by 37 percent, while NBCOlympics.com traffic went up 70 percent. At one point that day, 260,000 concurrent users were on MSNBC.com. But all the testing paid off. Not only did the servers stay up, but availability continued to average 99.8 percent.
The lowest availability at MSNBC.com was 99.5 percent on February 21, when Corrigan believes the site may have had 320,000 concurrent users. The Web team was not able to record concurrent users due to work it was doing on the voting application. But it did measure 1.3Gb/sec of actual egress (outgoing) data at one point in that day. Traffic was equivalent, in terms of page views and egress bandwidth, to the traffic the site experienced on September 11.
"This was a huge success for MSNBC, MSN, and Microsoft," says Corrigan. "In the end, the technology proved itself." The near real-time results were better than ever before, Corrigan adds—sometimes faster than television. The site was always available. In addition, the Society of Publication Designers selected the Olympics.com site for a Silver Medal design award out of 7,500 submissions.
As for plans for the next Olympics, Corrigan says that MSNBC.com is finally catching its breath. After an eight-month marathon, it's a well-deserved rest.
Michael ([email protected]) is a freelance writer based in East Sound, Washington.
