Although the server outages and crippled features were very annoying for players around the launch of Pokémon Go, it was just as frustrating for the developers. It was also rather surprising though, as even though they prepared for a "worst" case scenario where more than five times the expected traffic showed up, it turned out to be far more than that.
10 times as much the worst case in fact, so more than 50 times what the expected/target early traffic was.
No wonder the servers couldn't cope.
15 minutes after Pokémon Go launched in Australia, the servers had already been hit with as much traffic as Niantic expected from its global launch, so it immediately knew things were heading in a dangerous direction.
According to the Google report on the game's launch, the search giant added an extra 1,000 nodes to its server network to help pick up the slack and immediately went over Niantic's code to try and slow the amount of traffic that the app was sending out.
That's likely why the tracking feature disappeared shortly after launch, as it was simply too much data to send back and forth.
It's a shame now that the game has settled down that it hasn't returned, but at least we have a basic tracking system in play.
Equally surprising as the enormous launch though was that it didn't die off. Normally poor server performance can cause people to abandon a game, but Pokémon Go remained popular throughout its first month. It's not quite at its peak any more, but there are still many millions of players worldwide.
Are you still playing?
