How Web Engineers Avoided Breaking a Website when Kim Kardashian Tried to Break the Internet

January 22, 2015

Last November, Paper Magazine posted up some very… ahem, racy photos of Kim Kardashian. Titled “Break the Internet,” the site was expecting a tremendous amount of traffic. The kind of traffic that excites and terrifies people whose job is to ensure websites stay up and running.

How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW). It’s Safe for Work, and really delves more into the work that went into ensuring the site remained online.

What PAPER was asking was: Can you take a website that we use to reach hundreds of thousands of people in a given month and turn it into a website that can reach tens of millions of people or more? Or rather, “can you turn our tour bus into an airplane for a week or two?”

For the “Break the Internet” campaign to be successful, the Paper website needed to stay, well… unbroken.

Ford writes with great humor and clarity. Despite this rather daunting looking image, the article should be quite accessible even for those who aren’t web developers, or familiar with servers. Or who don’t use “Jizzawatt with the Hamstring extensions and Graunt.ns for all their smexing.”

I had heard about the Kardashian campaign, and mostly know of it as a brief Internet “thing.” But hearing Ford’s summary of the back end of things was really quite fascinating. Moreso to me, than the actual event itself.

Getting a celebrity to agree to nude photographs is no small feat. So too, it seems, is maintaining a website that serves up said photographs.

[Image from Paper Magazine]