106: Chapter 106: Douyin and Weibo crashed, topic views exceeded one billion!

Zhang Yixing's voice tore through Yanjing's night sky via the speakers.

At the bottomless passageway on the left side of the main stage, a cold white backlighting lit up.

The smoke inside the passageway was blown away by the wind.

A tall figure stepped out, walking into everyone's line of sight against the backlighting.

Dressed in a pure black performance outfit, there were no exaggerated sequins, nor any complicated accessories.

The signature tuft of curly bangs on his forehead was blown by the cool night breeze, revealing his sharp, chiseled brow bone.

He walked very slowly, taking steady strides.

Step by step, he crossed more than half of the stage.

He walked to the exact center of the stage.

He stopped beside Zhang Yixing.

The fifty thousand people at the scene fell silent for half a second.

Immediately following that, fifty thousand throats tore apart simultaneously.

A wave of sound surged into the sky, shaking the steel frame structure of the Workers Stadium.

"Su Chen!"

"Big Senior Brother!"

"KING! Welcome back!"

"We've waited five years for you!"

"You're finally willing to come out!"

"God Su is awesome!"

"The god of Chinese Street Dance!"

"I don't care, today I just want to watch you Dancing!"

"Zhang Yixing did a great job!"

"SM Entertainment, go to hell!"

"Today, no one can even think of cutting off your power!"

"Su Chen, don't leave anymore!"

"..."

Crying and roaring merged together, turning into a deafening wave of sound.

Yan Yu held her phone up in the front row of the stands, her hands shaking so much she couldn't hold onto the stabilizer, and tears dropped down patter by patter.

Shen Yun gripped the guardrail with both hands, her eyes fixed fiercely on that black figure on the stage.

At this second, the bullet comments in the live broadcast room ushered in the highest peak of accumulation.

[He came out! He really came out!]

[With this aura, there's no need for backup dancers at all; just standing there makes him the center of attention!]

[This pure black performance outfit echoes Brother Xing's pure white perfectly, my tears are so worthless!]

[I knew he would definitely come; he wouldn't abandon his brothers!]

[A man that fifty billion couldn't buy!]

[Do the South Korean legal teams dare to speak now? Do they dare call security? Let's see who dares to touch him today!]

[This is the confidence of the Chinese people; our very own ACE is back!]

[This face, this figure—even just standing there without Dancing can instantly crush the Chinese Entertainment Industry.]

[My entire dormitory floor is screaming, even the dorm auntie is banging on basins!]

[Back then, I was right outside that practice room, and today I finally get to see him step onto the stage again.]

[Big Senior Brother! Lead them forward one more time!]

[Take a screenshot! I'm going to set this historic moment as a family heirloom!]

[...]

The scrolling speed of the bullet comments on Yan Yu's phone screen suddenly slowed down.

The screen froze.

A white circle appeared right in the middle of the screen, rotating mechanically.

One second, two seconds.

"Why is there no video anymore?"

Yan Yu forcefully slapped the back of her phone, "I haven't used up my data yet!"

On the surrounding stands, countless fans holding up their phones for live broadcasting also lowered their heads one after another.

"My side cut off too!"

"Did Douyin crash?"

"I can't connect to the internet anymore!"

...

Yanjing, Zhongguancun Douyin Building Headquarters.

On the large screen of the 12th-floor monitoring center, the indicator lights of the eight main server nodes instantly jumped from green to deep red.

The alarm sounded through the entire floor.

Supervisor Chen Fei yanked his tie loose, staring with bloodshot eyes at the data waterfall on the main control console.

"What is going on! Didn't I tell you to shift all the e-commerce bandwidth over!"

The technician was covered in sweat, his hands tapping on the keyboard into afterimages, "Supervisor Chen, we shifted it! But the exact moment Su Chen appeared, the number of people entering the room experienced a fault-like surge! Three million people flooded in within a single second, and the total concurrent requests exceeded three hundred percent of the server's bearing limit!"

"The main trunk line can't hold up! The gateway firewall judged it as a DDOS attack and automatically cut off the connection channel!"

Supervisor Chen Fei took a deep breath and grabbed the landline telephone on the desk.

It cannot be cut off.

With this level of nationwide traffic tonight, whoever gets cut off will be drowned in the spit of netizens.

"Go borrow!"

Supervisor Chen Fei roared, "Find other major companies to transfer resources!"

He dialed the phone of Lao Wang, the Operation Director of Sina Weibo.

"Hello, Lao Wang. Help me out in an emergency, cut half of your Yanjing server room's redundant computing power over to our gateway; Douyin's side can't handle the load anymore."

Supervisor Chen Fei's tone was urgent.

Lao Wang's furious roar came from the other end of the phone, "Chen Fei, are you out of your mind! Do you think my side is sitting idle? Take a look at Weibo's trending search list right now! The top twenty items are all Su Chen! Topic view counts have directly broken through one billion! All three groups of my backup servers have been deployed, and they are still counting down to a crash. Where am I supposed to get computing power for you? Hang up!"

Beep, beep, beep.

Supervisor Chen Fei slammed down the phone receiver hard.

"Supervisor Chen, the recovery progress is stuck at thirty percent and won't go through."

The technician turned back and shouted.

Supervisor Chen Fei gritted his teeth, picked up his own phone, and flipped out a number.

The executive dedicated line of the Tencent Cloud Data Center.

The call connected.

"President Zhang, I am Chen Fei from Douyin."

Supervisor Chen Fei got straight to the point, "Lending a path. Allocate three channels of enterprise-grade backbone network computing power from your Shenzhen and Gui'an server rooms to me. Consider it me owing you a huge favor."

The other party was silent for two seconds, and the sound of keyboard tapping came over: "That live broadcast of Su Chen?"

"Right."

"I'll open five channels for you, and send the port protocol to your email in ten seconds. Don't thank me, my wife is also watching the concert on my tablet, and she almost smashed the screen when it disconnected just now. Hurry up."

"Many thanks!"

Supervisor Chen Fei hung up the phone and waved his hand.

"Port access! All-staff grid integration! Immediately reconnect the signal back to the Workers Stadium site!"

Exactly three minutes.

During these three minutes, Douyin's entire live broadcasting section was in a paralyzed state.

Within three minutes, the search term "Douyin Crashed" parachuted straight to the top of the trending search lists across major platforms.

Three minutes later, the white circle on Yan Yu's phone screen disappeared, and the screen cut back in.

Still that stage, still that black figure.

Yan Yu glanced at the online viewer count in the upper right corner.

She drew a sharp breath, completely stunned in place.

Ten million.

This number skipped past the ten-million threshold and was still climbing upwards at a speed of tens of thousands per second.

[Holy crap, it's finally alive!]

[It lagged for a full three minutes! Douyin, are you even competent!]

[Everyone look at the online count, it broke ten million!]

[Never seen anything like this in a lifetime, a single person paralyzed the servers of a super major company.]

[How is this a top traffic star? This is a traffic black hole!]

[I just heard Douyin had to borrow servers from Tencent to come back to life, that's too outrageous!]

[...]

Magic City, inside the e-sports room.

Wang Wenjian took off his headphones and rubbed his numb scalp.

During those three minutes of disconnection, he was so anxious that he walked around the room more than fifty times, almost smashing his newly bought monitor.

As soon as the screen recovered, he saw that string of data in the upper left corner of the main screen and slapped his computer desk.

"Brothers, did you see that clearly?"

Wang Wenjian pointed at the screen, his voice dry and hoarse, "This is the first single live broadcast room on our platform since its establishment to break ten million real-time online users. That's not even counting other rebroadcasts and text-and-image updates. Douyin is such a huge company, bragging every day about how invincible their algorithm is, yet today they got their main nerve cut off by someone who hasn't even been back for a few days."

[This is the real big brother; he doesn't make a move unless necessary, but when he does, he yanks out the network cables.]

[Didn't capital want to ban him? What are they going to ban him with! Ban him with their heads!]

[Those three minutes felt like a century to me, it worried me to death.]

[The South Korean legal teams are probably checking flights back to Seoul right now.]

[I just want to know if today's fifty-thousand-person venue can support God Su's dance steps.]

[The Chinese Entertainment Industry is changing its skies, starting tonight.]

[With this aura, I want to stand up at attention right through the screen.]

[Lao Wang, stop boasting, shut up and watch the live stream! It's about to start!]

[...]

Not just Douyin and Weibo.

At this moment, every refreshed post on Baidu Tieba showed the exact same name.