10,000 Instagram influencers and affiliates, hundreds of thousands of bots, a massive DDOS attack, and the most nerve-wracking event of 2021 for our team.
The Task: Develop a platform for an online conference with 10,000 participants, including interactive elements and effective networking opportunities.
📦 What the Client Needed
This project landed on our radar the same day we wrapped up a corporate event for Eldorado. We hadn’t even finished exporting the stats from the just-concluded two-day event when my work phone rang. A male voice introduced himself as Ilya.
At that moment, he only mentioned that he was organizing an online conference for 6,000 people and needed a reliable platform and a solid broadcasting team.
That’s how we first heard about Instaprojector and influencer Alexandra Mitroshina, whose event Ilya was producing. To our embarrassment, we realized that no one on our team knew who this influencer was, despite her having over 2.5 million Instagram followers.
🧠 Preparation
The task initially seemed pretty standard: 6,000 online viewers, with a need for interactive audience engagement through polls, chat, word clouds, and a Q&A form for the speakers. However, there was also an unusual request—to create an effective networking tool for conference participants.
After brainstorming, we decided to take inspiration from a proven tool for online networking: Tinder. In the new module we developed for the Pitcha platform, event participants were invited to fill out a profile, just like in the app, indicating their interests and competencies. Since the event was focused on Instagram blogging, we decided to use participants' Instagram profile pictures as avatars. To ensure that networking could continue even after the Instaprojector event, user profiles also included an active link to their Instagram profiles.
Another task for our development team was to ensure that only ticket holders could access the platform. However, ticket sales were handled by a third-party service. The representatives from that service suggested closing ticket sales 24 hours before the event and sending us a database of ticket buyers, which we could use for verification during login.
The main downside to this approach was that the organizers might lose out on some revenue from last-minute ticket sales. We proposed an alternative solution: synchronizing databases via a webhook.
As it turned out, around 500 participants registered in the 24 hours before Instaprojector started, and the decision to use a webhook allowed the organizers to earn an additional 2 million rubles.
As the event approached, more and more people bought tickets, and the load on the platform increased. The initial 6,000 participants grew to 8,000, and eventually to 10,000. Seeing this growth, we prepared for the possibility of even higher server loads. By the time registrations opened on the platform, we were ready to handle up to 50,000 potential participants.
The day before Instaprojector, we conducted final tests and, pleased with the results, felt confident that everything would go smoothly.
🎬 OnAir
The big day arrived. The stream was live, participants were logging in via the webhook data, chatting, and networking in the business Tinder. Server CPU usage was at 40%, but server logs indicated that something was off.
We saw a massive number of requests hitting the server, and the channel was clogged. But we had tested for a load of 50,000 users, and there were supposed to be no more than 10,000. So, what was happening? It turns out we were under a DDOS attack, and the load was equivalent to about 500,000 users instead of the expected 10,000.
Interactive features were lagging badly, and even the chat (which we hadn’t anticipated would be an issue) was slowing down. We urgently needed a solution.
Rescheduling the event wasn’t an option—it would have caused major dissatisfaction among participants. After all, this wasn’t just 10 people but 10,000, all of whom had planned their time around the conference. Quickly shifting the audience to indestructible YouTube wasn’t viable either, as attendees were promised all the features of our platform, and many were looking forward to networking in the business Tinder.
The tech team expanded the channel to its maximum capacity, but even that wasn’t enough. We began shutting down everything that could consume resources: all analytics, all logs, and any non-essential features. If you think about it, it was like driving a car down the highway at full speed while stripping off everything that could reduce weight—doors, windows, hood, seats—until all that was left was the frame, engine, wheels, and steering wheel. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was moving!
For the next few hours, we continued on this Frankenstein-solution. We had never been so relieved to see the finish line—the end of the broadcast. Finally, we could breathe a sigh of relief and take pride in the fact that we had made it through.
🏅 Results
When the server issues due to the attack first began, the organizers initially blamed us for the platform’s instability and didn’t believe it was an external attack. Fortunately, the logs, which had been recorded from the start of the event until we turned them off to optimize the load, clearly showed that we weren’t at fault. In the end, we were able to prove that our team didn’t fail the event but instead saved it, thanks to our team’s high level of expertise.
The unexpectedly high load on the cloud server resulted in significant financial losses for us. However, at the moment of decision-making, this was secondary to the need to save the conference.
Instaprojector didn’t bring us a profit, but it gave us invaluable experience, which has been extremely useful for other large online events since then. From that point on, we started offering our clients extended DDOS protection to prevent a repeat of this situation. And this experience working with Sasha Mitroshina has grown into a long-term collaboration, including several more conferences and the development of the mobile app MoveUp.