Reddit made international headlines by surprising the online world with an "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" chat session with none other than President Barack Obama.
At roughly 4:00 p.m. ET, Twitter and other online communities were abuzz with the news that President Obama would be the latest guest on Reddit's famed AMA chat program. "Hi, I'm Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything. I'll be taking your questions for half an hour starting at about 4:30 ET," the President announced on Reddit's forum. Obama tweeted the message as well.
The image President Barack Obama issued to prove his presence on Reddit yesterday.
Sadly, Reddit also made technology news by failing to sustain the enormous traffic levels brought on by the event -- a situation Reddit general manager Erik Martin attributes to apparently unanticipated flood of site activity.
"Our infrastructure [is] very complex, and there were bottlenecks due to the overwhelming interest in the IAMA," Martin wrote to me in an email today.
Reddit got over 4.3 million page views during yesterday's session; and so far today, it's gotten another 2.3 million. Apparently, that was enough to bollix the system. I was among those who got Reddit's disappointing out-of-order sign during yesterday's session.
Visitors to Reddit's site late yesterday afternoon got this image instead of President Obama's Ask Me Anything chat session.
How could a major site, with an enormous IT-oriented user base, fail to anticipate the potential burden of traffic this session would bring?
There's no easy answer. But Erik Martin isn't blaming hosting provider Amazon Web Services, though an outage there brought down Reddit this spring. "Any problems were due to our infrastructure and nothing with AWS," he wrote me today.
I don't know about the advisor part, stotheco (unless we're talking about the media prep that went behind this beforehand; it would be hard to imagine an advisor not foreseeing a space program question). Whatever one thinks of the the man's politics, it's a decent bet that a politician with that kind of savvy can probably manage that kind of double talk on his own well enough. ;)
LOL, @Joe. I saw this in the Obama thread as well when I checked Reddit the other day. Sounds like a very diplomatic answer that probably required an advisor or two's approval before it was posted.
Thanks for posting the link, smkinoshita. Now that it's all done and over with, I think Reddit should study their stats (looks like they're doing that already) and come up with solutions to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
Their IAMA series looks interesting and I'm sure it will continue generating huge interest and responses from users, depending on who their guests are.
It's amazing that websites can still be taken down by actual humans, and not just DDOS attacks from zombie computers! (Or is there any evidence that there were zombie computers at work taking down Obama's AMA?)
Once they get this worked out, I suspect we'll see more high-profile guests. I dropped by to see the chat but couldn't navigate while there - it was on the way down. I haven't been back.
Are you considering increasing funds to the space program?
Answer:
Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level - so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to a asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight.
So much for the actual question that was asked.
Reminiscent of this scene with the Governor in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," is it not?
"Was that a yes or a no?" "It's a possible maybe."
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