anyone know how BA managed to get 6,654 people on at once?

i mean on average there are only around 1000, how did it get to 6000? what event was happening?

A bunch of bot traffic? (i have no idea)

Traffic can not be modeled as an average, it is a random variable, probably a standard normal distribution. It has an average of ~1000, but probably has quite a large variance (how much it can vary at any point in time). In this case, you can model the likelihood of a certain number of people being on at any given time.

Let’s forget the maths junk though, I only do that when I have to. Let’s look at it sensibly:

  • People visit at random times
  • Some of those random times will line up
  • Sometimes more those random times will line than other times
    As a result, just about any number of people could be on at any given time

Ohhhhh, that. Yeah, someone posted a picture of Jennifer Lawrence licking a spoon of honey and the servers got overloaded. The admins really did not want to take the picture down(of course!), but they had to do what was best for the community. No one could get on the site, for crying out loud! It was sheer madness.

To the moderators: we all understood in the end. The spoon of honey was a step to far, and so fair play to you.

All the voices in my head.
How do you spell Jennifer?
Im going to redo all the thumbnails on my youtube videos today!