53: Chapter 53 Traffic Explosion! Piercing the Backyard of the Penguin Empire

2:00 AM.

For the internet in 2011, this was the "trash time" when traffic hit its lowest point.

According to the patterns of conventional products, after the first wave of peaks, the data should have started to decline.

However, the trend of the curve on the big screen made everyone in the command center hold their breath.

That line graph representing the number of online users and registered users showed no signs of fatigue or decline; instead, it presented an explosive secondary surge.

Due to the addictive "swipe up to see the next one" mechanism of Xinghuo, as well as the endless emotional engagement in the live broadcast rooms, these netizens simply couldn't stop.

[600,000]!

[750,000]!

[800,000]!

Just at the moment the real-time online user count soared past 800,000, a piercing alarm sounded inside "Lab Zero"!

"Technical Expert Su Hua! The load rate of the Cold Core server room has exceeded 95%! The database write channel is congested, and concurrent requests have exceeded the design threshold! The servers are about to collapse!"

A backend engineer stood up, dripping with sweat, and reported.

No one had expected this traffic storm to be so violent.

The Cold Core server room, originally estimated to handle millions of daily active users, entered a red-light flashing emergency state on the very first night.

If the system crashed at this moment, hundreds of thousands of users would be lost, and the reputation and traffic built up in the early stages would be wasted.

"Damn it, don't these people ever sleep?!"

At this critical juncture, the usually steady Technical Expert Su Hua tore off his jacket. His eyes were bloodshot as he let out a roar.

He sprang up from his chair, too busy to ask Shen Du for instructions, and waved his hand fiercely:

"Forget the budget!"

"Call the heads of the backbone server rooms for Telecom and Unicom immediately! Tell them Jiyuan Technology will wire the money right now!"

There was a gambler's frenzy in Technical Expert Su Hua's voice:

"Throw money at it! Use the fastest speed to force an increase of 10 million direct traffic channels for each! Connect them for me immediately!"

Following Technical Expert Su Hua's roar, the entire technical team entered the highest level of emergency response state.

After a few minutes of brief lag, as the newly purchased 20 million temporary traffic channels were connected, the servers, which were on the verge of collapse, finally caught a breath of air.

Once the channels were widened, the massive amount of traffic that had been blocked outside surged in instantly.

It was past 4:00 AM.

After experiencing a thrilling resurrection, the numbers on the big screen did not stagnate; they charged upward again, breaking through 1.2 million.

In this deep night of the May Day holiday, when everyone should have been asleep, over a million smartphone users across China were watching live streams, browsing Short Videos, and posting updates on Xinghuo, this "three-in-one" platform.

At 6:00 AM, the skyline of the Magic City turned a pale white.

The faint light of early morning penetrated the glass curtain wall of the 55th floor of the IFC, spilling onto every person with bloodshot eyes inside "Lab Zero."

On the big screen, after six full hours, Xinghuo delivered a battle report.

The total number of registered users had broken through the 3 million mark.

After the baptism of the deep night, the servers consistently maintained hundreds of thousands of highly concurrent active online users.

This was a figure that a startup company wouldn't dare to imagine.

One must know, it is currently 2011.

This was an era where smartphones were just beginning to become popular, and 4G network signals only covered first-tier cities.

At this point in time, the absolute hegemon in the domestic social and traffic field was the Penguin Empire.

At this time, the daily active users of QQ were only around 50 million.

Meanwhile, WeChat, which had just launched the "voice intercom" feature, had only barely climbed from 10,000 to 60,000 daily active users.

But what about Xinghuo?

It had only been online for six hours.

It did not follow the traditional "boiling a frog in warm water" strategy.

Instead, carrying the DNA of a trinity of social networking, Short Video, and live streaming, it forcefully smashed open the seemingly impregnable social barrier of Tencent and stabbed into the hinterland of the Penguin Empire.

However, facing this achievement, there was no celebration in the command center.

The three executives, Technical Expert Su Hua, Operations Manager Zhang Nan, and General Manager Chen Shengqiang, watched the data on the big screen quietly.

After the brief shock, their eyes became even colder and more serious.

At exactly 6:00 AM.

These three core executives didn't say a word of nonsense, nor did they ask for a rest.

They turned around in tacit understanding and walked back to their workstations.

They immediately threw themselves into the subsequent massive and complex expansion and defense deployment. Because they knew in their hearts that the fire of Xinghuo had already been ignited.

Tonight, they had fought a surprise attack.

But what came next...

When the sky brightened, and when that Penguin Empire entrenched in Shenzhen woke up to realize their backyard was on fire...

A truly relentless meat-grinder war would only just be beginning.

May 4, 2011, the second workday after the end of the May Day holiday.

In Shenzhen, the Tencent headquarters building on Shennan Avenue welcomed the crowd of employees returning to work after the holiday.

As employees swiped their cards and poured in, this internet company began to operate once again.

However, for the helmsmen at the very top, this morning had an unusual atmosphere.

Inside the president's office on the top floor of the building, Ma Huateng held a cup of morning tea.

His usually gentle face was now filled with gravity, and his brows were knitted together.

He stared at the computer screen in front of him.

From the moment he stepped into the office at 8:00 AM and opened his internal email, his inbox had been stuffed with urgent reports from various data monitoring departments and market risk control departments.

"Ding! — [Urgent] Monitoring report on the abnormal fluctuations of social traffic across the entire network during the May Day holiday."

"Ding! — [High Risk] Competitor Analysis: The growth trajectory of a new type of multimedia social software."

The red-marked urgent emails kept popping up.

These reports exuded a signal that made the data analysts feel pressured.

Over the past three short days of the holiday, a mysterious flow of traffic had been rapidly seizing the screen time that originally belonged to the Penguin Empire's netizens.

Ma Huateng put down his teacup, his fingers gripping the mouse tightening slightly.

He quickly clicked on the core data summary report, his gaze sweeping over those steep growth curves.

In the end, the source of all the intelligence and data anomalies converged on the same unfamiliar name: Jiyuan Technology.

And the social software that this company had just launched in the early hours of May Day: Xinghuo.

In fact, what first brought Xinghuo into the view of Tencent's top management was not the data on the monitoring dashboard, but an incident that occurred inside Tencent's own base camp.

Time rewind to noon one day ago.

Inside the employee cafeteria of the Tencent headquarters building.

For these high-pressure programmers and product managers, lunchtime was a rare moment of relaxation.

Most people would take the opportunity to chat or watch local TV series downloaded to their phones in advance.

But in a corner of the cafeteria, a contract employee from the technical department was behaving abnormally.

The food tray in front of him remained largely untouched, and he was staring intently at the smartphone in his hand.

Every now and then, his thumb would swipe up on the screen, followed by a burst of low laughter.