Load testing, observability, and product engineering notes.https://maxoperf.com/https://maxoperf.com/blog/a-year-of-load-failures/https://maxoperf.com/blog/a-year-of-load-failures/Twenty real outages, ten failure patterns, one year. A guided tour of what load does to software in production — and how to test before it happens to you.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/arc-raiders-server-overload/https://maxoperf.com/blog/arc-raiders-server-overload/ARC Raiders ran clean for days after launch, then login queues and matchmaking broke as concurrent players kept climbing. Reporting attributes this to sustained growth beyond a one-time peak. Embark did not confirm a root cause.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/aws-us-east-1-outage-october-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/aws-us-east-1-outage-october-2025/A DNS race triggered the October 2025 AWS US-East-1 cascade, but it was the recovery overload — thousands of services reconnecting at once — that turned a blip into 15 hours of disruption.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/battlefield-6-launch-server-queues/https://maxoperf.com/blog/battlefield-6-launch-server-queues/On launch day EA queued over 500,000 concurrent players. Here's the thundering-herd pattern behind that decision and how to test for it before your next big release.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/best-buy-black-friday-crash-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/best-buy-black-friday-crash-2025/Best Buy's site and app buckled under Black Friday morning traffic for roughly 90 minutes in November 2025. No official RCA was published — but the failure pattern is well understood.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/clerk-cloud-sql-migration-outage/https://maxoperf.com/blog/clerk-cloud-sql-migration-outage/A routine storage migration turned into a 26-minute outage for Clerk in March 2026. The dependency-contention failure pattern it exposed applies to any team running a live database.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/cloudflare-outage-november-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/cloudflare-outage-november-2025/A database query change caused an oversized configuration file to exceed a hard internal limit, crashing Cloudflare's core proxy globally for ~3 hours in November 2025. The lesson is boundary testing before shipping config changes.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/fiserv-zelle-banking-outage-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/fiserv-zelle-banking-outage-2025/In 2025, a change at a Fiserv data center cascaded across a shared core-banking platform, taking Zelle and 60+ banking apps offline for over 12 hours during a payday window.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/github-capacity-outages-2025-2026/https://maxoperf.com/blog/github-capacity-outages-2025-2026/GitHub suffered dozens of capacity-related outages between 2025 and early 2026. Here's what caused them and how to test for the same failure pattern.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/google-cloud-outage-june-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/google-cloud-outage-june-2025/A null-pointer bug in new quota-policy code crash-looped Google Cloud's request-authorization service globally in June 2025. Most regions recovered in 40 minutes — but us-central1 spent 3 hours fighting a retry flood caused by missing backoff logic.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/hollow-knight-silksong-storefront-crash/https://maxoperf.com/blog/hollow-knight-silksong-storefront-crash/Silksong's no-pre-orders launch decision concentrated 535,000 day-one players into a single minute and brought down Steam, PS Store, and eShop. Here's how to test for it.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/irs-wheres-my-refund-outage-2026/https://maxoperf.com/blog/irs-wheres-my-refund-outage-2026/In February 2026, the IRS refund tracker went offline mid-filing surge. The lesson is not the outage itself — it is that maintenance windows must be planned around load-tested seasonal peaks.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/neet-2025-results-day-crash/https://maxoperf.com/blog/neet-2025-results-day-crash/On results day, 2M+ candidates hit neet.nta.nic.in at once, triggering 503/504 errors and blank scorecards. Here is what happened and how to test for it.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/netflix-nfl-christmas-streaming-issues/https://maxoperf.com/blog/netflix-nfl-christmas-streaming-issues/Netflix viewers reported buffering and casting failures during NFL Christmas 2025. No confirmed RCA, but the live-event load pattern has a clear lesson.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/odyssey-imax-ticket-onsale-crash/https://maxoperf.com/blog/odyssey-imax-ticket-onsale-crash/When Nolan's The Odyssey went on sale, AMC and Fandango buckled under simultaneous demand for limited 70mm seats. Here's the failure pattern and how to test for it.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/openai-chatgpt-outage-june-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/openai-chatgpt-outage-june-2025/A 10-plus-hour ChatGPT outage in June 2025 affected free, Plus, API, and Sora users. No official root-cause analysis was published. Here is what the pattern suggests — and how to test for it.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/shopify-cyber-monday-outage-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/shopify-cyber-monday-outage-2025/On Cyber Monday 2025, Shopify's admin, POS, and API access went down for hours while merchant storefronts largely survived. The company officially attributed the issue to a login authentication flow problem.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/slack-outage-may-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/slack-outage-may-2025/In May 2025, Slack's growth hit a silent limit in its routing configuration, cutting live connectivity for users for nearly two hours. Here's what the pattern means for any growing team.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/ssa-website-crashes-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/ssa-website-crashes-2025/In early 2025, the Social Security Administration portal crashed repeatedly after a software update. Reporting attributed it to staff not testing the software against high user volumes before launch.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/stranger-things-5-netflix-outage/https://maxoperf.com/blog/stranger-things-5-netflix-outage/Netflix pre-scaled ~30% for the Stranger Things S5 premiere but still went down for ~20 minutes. The spike-test lesson for every streaming team.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/uk-banks-payday-outages-2025/https://maxoperf.com/blog/uk-banks-payday-outages-2025/In 2025, Lloyds, Halifax, TSB, Nationwide, and others failed on payday Fridays. The formal cause was not disclosed, but the pattern points to peak transaction volume colliding with a suspected shared dependency.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/api-performance-testing-ci-gates/https://maxoperf.com/blog/api-performance-testing-ci-gates/A practical pattern for turning API load tests into CI/CD gates without hiding failures behind one average number.Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/private-load-generation-byoc/https://maxoperf.com/blog/private-load-generation-byoc/Use private runner locations when the target is internal, regulated, latency-sensitive, or protected by network boundaries.Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/observability-during-a-run/https://maxoperf.com/blog/observability-during-a-run/What to watch during a load test: throughput, latency percentiles, errors, runner health, and the logs that explain failures.Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://maxoperf.com/blog/why-cloud-load-testing/https://maxoperf.com/blog/why-cloud-load-testing/How managed runners, private locations, repeatable bundles, and shared run results make load testing easier to trust.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT