I didn't see in the Twitter thread--can anyone tell me what was driving this huge spike in traffic on Gov.uk? I'm not in the UK so I'm not up to the minute with political announcements.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-lockdown-stay-at-home
specifically, this would seem to coincide with the PM addressing the nation on TV.
Every time I see this comment about multicast, I think people are missing the point of the internet.
For live events like press conferences or sports this is already solved with broadcasting.
16 million people watched that press conference on BBC TV, broadcasting is very efficent at getting live pictures out. The BBC did experiment with multicast in the past, but CDNs seem to be a more scalable solution ironically.
However in this specific case, the pictures actually left downing street via multicast (SDI form camera into encoder, MPEG-TS over multicast to the studio, back to SDI to get encoded on whichever output chain it is - Terrestial, Satelite, Cable, online)
Indeed the standard to replace SDI (2110) is built around multicast, broadcast certainly uses multicast a fair bit.
Huge audience plus that equalled massive traffic spike.
Like many, I was hitting F5 repeatedly on this page waiting for a document that didn't seem to be there, eager to know restrictions on various aspects of life. But the /coronavirus page just contained stale advice from December.
Eventually at 8:15pm, somebody found a link to a PDF of the new guidance and posted it on Twitter:
"This has all been done with such crashing urgency that they haven’t even been able to transpose the PDF version of the guidance into the website yet, it is here:"
https://twitter.com/AdamWagner1/status/1346188409300258816
[this is how it played out for me at least, did anyone else see this differently?]