Appointment.com Catches the Flu

Many of our customers will have noticed that site performance on Thursday was extremely and unacceptably slow. I wanted to fill you in on what happened and how we are resolving it.

We recently added as customers several vaccination clinics that are offering online appointments for H1N1 flu shots. Demand for the limited quantity of the H1N1 vaccines is so great that an enormous number of people all went to the site at the exact same time, creating a huge spike in traffic. Even once the vaccines were all gone, people were still trying to get appointments, so there was little letup in traffic over the course of the day. To be specific, we saw traffic spike by almost 20 times our normal traffic, and continue at the level for almost the entire day. Quite simply, we were overwhelmed by the suddenness and volume of this traffic, and many of you bore the brunt of this through slow or inaccessible calendars.

Due to this, we are adding additional server capacity. This will require a scheduled outage this Sunday night, November 8, from 8:00 PM to midnight PST; we have chosen these off-peak hours so as to inconvenience the least number of customers. Once this upgrade is complete, we are confident that Appointment.com will have sufficient server capacity to handle sudden spikes in traffic, and that this incident should not reoccur.

We appreciate your patience and forbearance more than you can imagine, and hope that you will find the performance improvements of Appointment.com a worthwhile addition.