Coke, SodaStream & the 13 Websites That Crashed During Super Bowl 2013
13 Websites That Crashed During Super Bowl 2013
Coke
We predicted Coke as the #1 most likely website to crash last Friday. It turned out to be a good call on our part, as Coke had the worst performance of the night by far. Coke took an interactive approach to its commercial, directing users to vote for the ending at www.cokechase.com. However, www.cokechase.com had a page load time average of 62 seconds – which was longer than their entire commercial! Since users expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less, they were not very happy. Hundreds of tweets from angry users came flooding in.
Run an ad for millions of dollars, and then take your site down for scheduled maintenance. Really?? twitter.com/lubsey/status/?
? Vince Lubsey (@lubsey)
February 4, 2013
No one is going to win the #CokeChase as the website is still down #Fail #SB47
? Kendall Walker (@kwdesignonline)
February 4, 2013
Wow. #CokeChase site down. Infrastructure and marketing FAIL.
? Trevor Sumner (@trevorsumner) February 4, 2013
Mega marketing fail - Coke chase website not only down but it's not mobile! Yes, Coke, we all have our PCs with us during the Super Bowl!
? Fran Jeanes (@franjeanes) February 4, 2013
@cocacola Yeah right! Just admit that the site crashed because you didn't plan for the bandwidth overload... Let's go see what #pepsi has.
? Bobby Hoskins (@GCDrummerBoy) February 4, 2013
How do you spend $4M on an ad that sends people to a website that is down! Wowzas @coke #CokeChase
? Sam Sova (@samsova) February 4, 2013
Coke Chase site is totally down. Way to prepare dudes. I wanted to vote for my ladies.
? Kayli Nugent (@KnowTheKnuge) February 4, 2013
What the? @coke cokechase.com site is down. What a bunch of losers. I'm drinking @pepsi. Thanks for wasting my time. #SuperBowlAds
? Toby Tamaye (@atmarketing) February 4, 2013
To make matters worse, Coke's main U.S. homepage only had 92% uptime for the night! This marks the second straight Super Bowl where Coke's website(s) has crashed. Can Coke learn from their mistakes or will they be having a 3-peat next year?
SodaStream
SodaStream created a lot of buzz with their ad showcasing their cool soda maker. Millions rushed to their website to check out more of the product. The surge in traffic instantly caused a spike in performance by 5 seconds! Soon enough, tweets came rolling in that the website was unavailable.
@sodastreamusa fails to plan for web traffic. Web site down or slow. #fail #sodastream
? John Thompson (@thompsonline) February 4, 2013
#SodaStream website completely down after #SuperBowl ad. Way to plan ahead for the traffic, webmaster.
? Byron Torre (@batorre) February 4, 2013
SodaStream paid millions for a TV ad during the SuperBowl. Website goes down within seconds due to traffic the ad provoked. #FAIL?
? Ben Simo (@QualityFrog) February 4, 2013
sodastream.com down after their Super Bowl commercial. should never happen. #poorplanning #architectforscale #learnhowtousethecloud
? philipgavlan (@philipgavlan) February 4, 2013
Sodastream is down. Maybe time for some cloud infra?
? Jeff Wilcox (@jeffwilcox) February 4, 2013
The Super Bowl advertiser rookie was unprepared for the burst in traffic and left many prospective customers with more to be desired.
Calvin Klein
GoDaddy wasn't the only Super Bowl advertiser to play off sex appeal in their advertisement, as Calvin Klein featured male models in nothing but their underwear. Users flocked to the website to see more of the, ahem - "product", but many were left disappointed as they could not access the website.
#calvinklein #fail website is down. instagr.am/p/VSeILbhCvw/
? Steve Garfield (@stevegarfield) February 4, 2013
So Calvin Klein's underwear is seamless?Their website?not so much RT @stevegarfield #calvinklein #fail website is down instagr.am/p/VSeILbhCvw/
? Mike Urbonas (@mikeurbonas) February 4, 2013
The website's performance increased by only 1 second over the ensuing hours, but a 1-second delay can decrease conversions by 7%! When it comes to the magnitude and scale of an event like the Super Bowl, every millisecond counts.
Axe
Axe launched one of the most buzzworthy ads of the night, as they are sending someone to space. Millions of aspiring (or wannabe) astronauts headed to www.axeapollo.com and www.axe.com to enter for their chance to win. The website, though, had a failure to launch. Houston, we have a problem. The website Axe sent people to, www.axeapollo.com, only had 88% uptime for the night and their homepage, www.axe.com, was only up for 93% of the time.
"@bgmilan17: Axeapollo.com I wanna go to space." Whoever is on the site and got to signup is lucky cuz the site is down.. And Im sad.
? Panama On My Mind (@paypuhboy) February 4, 2013
errrrrybody trying to get to the moon #axe yo shit is down.
? Candice Rohrman (@clrohrman) February 4, 2013
Apparently AXE Apollo site is down:twitpic.com/c0qx7u #SuperBowl
? Robert Hernandez (@webjournalist) February 4, 2013
The #axeapollo website is down. Everyone wants to go to space. #superbowl
? Scott Holley (@ScottHolley) February 4, 2013
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead's website turned into a ghost town (see what we did there?) during the game, just like we said it would last week. Even though they did not have a dedicated advertisement, they were featured in the Time Warner Cable commercial. Inconsistent performance over the past few weeks (pictured above) tells the whole story. A large number of requests (274) and page download size (3.5MB) resulted in the site being up for only 94% of the time all night.
Got Milk?
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson couldn't save the Got Milk? website from the attack its website took from traffic last night. As we predicted, Got Milk?'s Breakfast Blitz at www.milkmoustache.com came crashing down during the Super Bowl. There was no major performance decrease, but its availability spiked downward, staying up only 94% of the time.
Movies (The Lone Ranger, Fast and Furious 6, and Star Trek)
Over the past two years, movie websites have not performed too well. Last year, Act of Valor was the only movie website that crashed during the Super Bowl. This year, however, there were three: The Lone Ranger, Fast and Furious 6, and Star Trek. The Lone Ranger was the first ad up, and although its page load time stayed consistent, its uptime wasn't at 93%. Fast and Furious 6 was up next, and its performance took a massive hit after the airing of its commercial, more than doubling its page load time with only 97% uptime. The last one of the night, Star Trek, had the best performance out of the group with 98% uptime.
It's also interesting to point the performance of Iron Man. Though the website did not experience any outages or downtime, the website slowed down significantly - from 7.5 seconds to 20+ seconds, 3x as slow!
Cars (Audi, Hyundai, and Chrysler)
Audi was featured in the first commercial break of the night, and did not have any major outages, but had 1% of downtime - enough to include them on our list of crashers. Hyundai aired directly after Audi's advertisement, and maintained steady performance for a while. But later on in the night, the website became 2.5x slower and only had 98% uptime. The last of the group, Chrysler, ended up having the worst downtime of the group - a whopping total of 200+ outages recorded from our sample, which amounted to 93% uptime.
Blackberry
With the launch of the new, sleek Blackberry 10, users ventured to the website to check out the new gadget. The page is heavy in assets (3.5MB) and requests (143) - which puts it in the bottom 5% of all websites. The site maintained 97% uptime throughout the night.
Steps to Prevent Downtime in a Traffic Spike
Super Bowl advertisers need to be better prepared with their website performance and infrastructure to handle the burst in traffic they get after their ad airs. Here's a simple checklist they can use to improve their performance:
- Reduce the number of assets and asset weight to create smaller, more lightweight pages with faster page load times
- Use website performance monitoring to stay on top of any issues your website may be having 24x7
- Enlist a CDN to better reach your users geographically across the world and offload the majority your traffic
- Perform live load testing of your expected traffic, as it is the only way to gauge your actual performance under heavy load.
Did you experience any downtime or outages with one of the advertisers' websites? Let us know in the comments!
To check out the full results, you can head over to #BurstBowl.
