Disney+ is arguably the largest software release of all time in terms of scale. My estimate is that they will be handling 1-2% of all internet traffic by the end of the week.
I can't think of a launch of this scale that has gone smoothly. Modern console releases, AAA games with online multiplayer, Pokemon Go, healthcare.gov... all cases where organizations literally have billions in cash. It does not matter how much money you have or how great your engineering team is - you can't go scale 0 to 100 on launch day.
I've never handled a project like this, but I feel like the goal should be to meet what average demand will be once the high demand of the first few days goes down. No one is going to remember that they couldn't login to Disney+ on the first day as long as the experience on the second and going forward is strong.
Plus, its free press. "Disney+ so popular at launch it was hard to get into for a couple hours." Meanwhile, as people are getting home from work and reading that headline, and Disney+ now works.
OK - so if it is so obvious that you can't scale from 0 to 100 on launch day, why not anticipate that?
I imagine the gigantic Arctic cold front passing over the East Coast right now created a much larger demand than they were expecting on a non-holiday Tuesday morning while school is (supposed to be) in session.
Agreed. One of the reasons why maybe they didn’t that is because someone thought “we gotta get out those big series everything is expecting like Mandalorian out, and we can’t release it first on Denmark and not the US”, which someone probably replied “why don’t we launch in Denmark without any big names” which got laughed at because then none would want to sign up for it.
The tension between Marketing and Engineering makes another victim.
I believe Google specifically fight against this by mandating every project to have an insane scalable architecture from the get go. You can’t be Google and fail at that when you sell your infra to corporations promising that won’t be a problem. Someone at Disney+ probably made a calculated bet that if they can solve the problem soon, none will care about this in a few weeks.
I can't think of a launch of this scale that has gone smoothly. Modern console releases, AAA games with online multiplayer, Pokemon Go, healthcare.gov... all cases where organizations literally have billions in cash. It does not matter how much money you have or how great your engineering team is - you can't go scale 0 to 100 on launch day.