What happens when a website goes viral: how a site keeps up with millions of visitors

On 1 November 2021, the game Wordle had 90 players. Two months later, it had more than 300,000 players in a day. A week after that, it had two million. Now imagine that crowd arriving on a small website in five minutes, not in two months. Follow a small puzzle website through its busiest morning, and learn what the big websites do: load balancers, stateless servers, the database bottleneck, caching, a CDN, read replicas, message queues, autoscaling and rate limiting.