Sunday’s game between Knicks and Dallas Mavs drew huge viewership both domestically and internationally – even Mark Zuckerberg came out to watch the spectacular performance from Jeremy Lin amid his busy Facebook IPO schedule:

However, success can be your worst enemy, especially for website operations.

The surprising rise of Jeremy Lin is propelling NBA and Knicks to a new height in popularity. However,  it can also mean the worst nightmare for the web operations teams. A couple of weeks ago Yottaa reported that SuperBowl AD websites went down during SuperBowl, including brand names such as CokeCola and Accura.

NyKnicks Web Operations team should know it now in a bitter and sweet way: New York Knicks websites have been down  starting from the middle of the Knicks-Mav game when Yottaa initially noticed.

These sites include:

• www.nyknicks.com
• www.knicks.com
• https://knicksnow.com/live
• https://www.nba.com/knicks

From the the moment that Yottaa noticed sites down, it has been 65 minutes and they are still down.

Yottaa is all about making websites run well, run fast and run reliably.  So we did some analysis on why knicks.com went down and what remedies available.  The biggest problem we see about Knicks.com and nyknicks.com is that it didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support the #linsanity traffic. The sites seem to go to a single IP address, and are using old generation CDN services that aren’t designed for the modern web. As we pointed out earlier in a different post (see
https://blog.yottaa.com/2012/02/introducing-yottaa-cdn-a-revolutionairy-content-delivery-network), the modern web has evolved beyond the traditional CDNs. It is time to use the new generation CDN solution like what Yottaa provides – which has the intelligence at the network layer to handle surprises like this.

At the time of this writing, these sites are still down.  Yottaa has added website monitors to monitor these sites and we’ll be able to report back when these sites are back online.

ps. At 4:20pm ET, Knicks team added an HTTP redirection to redirect all traffic to a static splash page: https://www.nba.com/knicks/splash_new_york_knicks_social_media_2012_02_15.html. However, https://knicksnow.com/live is still down.