#BreakTheInternet?
A fascinating peek into the back end of running a website: how Paper prepped for a massive increase in traffic.
On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website (NSFW). It linked together all of these things—and other articles, too—under the “#breaktheinternet” hashtag.
There was one part of the Internet that PAPER didn’t want to break: The part that was serving up millions of copies of Kardashian’s nudes over the web.
Hosting that butt is an impressive feat. You can’t just put Kim Kardashian nudes on the Internet and walk away —that would be like putting up a tent in the middle of a hurricane. Your web server would melt. You need to plan.
link: How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end (SFW) — The Message — Medium.
