Five days of live coverage that broke every record we had
A five-Test series, a newsroom of thirty-one, and a live product that had to hold up when four million people arrived at the same minute. This is what we built, what nearly fell over, and what the numbers looked like at stumps on day five.
The challenge
Our previous peak concurrency was 610,000. Modelling said Wankhede day three would clear 3.8 million if Gill was still batting after lunch — and everything we had ever shipped assumed a slow, polite ramp. The match centre re-rendered the entire scorecard on every ball. At 12,000 requests a second that is not a design, it is a fire.
The commercial side had its own problem: three sponsors had bought the series on a fixed impression guarantee written before the fixture list moved into the holiday window.
The approach
We rewrote the match centre to patch single cells instead of redrawing the card, moved ball-by-ball updates onto a seven-second poll with an edge cache, and pre-rendered every static article shell so only the live regions were dynamic. Editorially, we staffed two full shifts per Test day plus an overnight desk for the Australian reaction cycle.
Every session break got a two-minute video explainer, filed within eleven minutes of the bell, and the fantasy desk pushed a revised XI at each interval.
The result
Sponsor delivery closed at 216% of the guaranteed impression floor, newsletter signups during the series ran to 184,000, and the match centre has been the template for every tournament product we have shipped since.