Nintendo's new game console is the Wii U, and this holiday shopping season they've been pushing a deal of a console that comes with a Legend Of Zelda game (Yes, I spoil my kids rotten, but it keeps me in hugs). The game doesn't come on a disk, but is downloaded from the Nintendo servers. Which have been down all day.
It seems that lots of people got these consoles for their kids and everyone hit the servers at the same time. And so the servers are doing an excellent impression of the Healthcare.gov exchange.
Fail.
9 comments:
Merry Christmas and happy new year.
I picture Scotty standing in a noisy server room clutching a bundle of UTP cables in one hand and an iPhone in the other shouting, "She can't take much more o'this, Captain!"
Yeah, but the Nintendo servers can probably handle more simultaneous connections than the .gov servers can.
If Nintendo had as many people hit their servers as Healthcare.gov did, they wouldn't break a sweat!
Howard Tayler, creator of the web comic Schlock Mercenary, coined a new term for it in a Twitter post today:
"I'm glad I got my son something in addition to Steam games, since Steam seems to be XMasDoS'd right now. Still, he's rightly grumpy."
Merry Christmas to you Borepatch, server fails notwithstanding.
A smart man would have opened the package, downloaded the game sometime the week before just because they loved their children,then played the game all the way through just to make sure there were no bugs in it. Then repackaged it, just saying because I have awesome hindsight.
I tried playing my steam games yesterday and had so much lag it was not worth the effort.
I hope nobody (who's not knew to the world of big downloads) was surprised by this. This has been happening since probably before 2000, which was about when I first noticed it. Every time something big drops, whether it's a new Windows beta or preview, or a new downloadable game, or even a game that requires (spit) online activation, this happens: the first couple days, the servers are swamped.
Probably Amazon is the only one who could avoid this. I shudder to think how much it would cost to rent enough servers to keep it from happening, though.
Rick, I don't understand why Nintendo didn't just rent out space in Amazon Web Services. Netflix uses them, and so it's massively scaleable.
Probably internal company IT politics, which would be dumb. You don't want to own the capacity to handle burst, you want to handle capacity for normal times and outsource the burst capacity to a highly elastic service.
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