Pokémon GO was way over its capacity less than two hours after launch

When Pokémon GO first launched, a number of server issues affected the game and prevented many from regularly playing. Niantic has revealed that this is because the game was over capacity less than two hours after making its debut. It exceeded the developer’s traffic estimates by a “ludicrous” amount, according to director of software engineering Ed Wu. “We knew that we had something special on our hands,” he said, “when we nearly exceeded our peak worldwide capacity — the expected number — in a couple of hours and were trending well on the way towards that five times, ‘ludicrous’ number on what we thought would be less than five percent of our total world-wide … install base in. That was the point at which I called in the cavalry … at Google.”

Source: Polygon