When the Church Broke the Internet
We dotted all our I's and crossed all our T's; we had every hair in place and all our ducks in a row, but we weren't prepared ... for breaking the Internet!
Thanks to everyone who joined us for worship on Sunday! Even though the service didn't come to your living room in quite the mode we were expecting, you were unfazed, and most of us were able to worship together just as we'd planned. Praise God!!
Here's a note we received from our streaming platform on Sunday afternoon:
Church Online Platform
When the Church Broke the Internet.
This is an unprecedented time for the global Church and for online ministry. For most churches running the Church Online Platform, services went smoothly, and we praise Jesus for the lives that were forever changed! For some churches, though, services went out around 9:15 a.m. CDT/10:15 EDT. In anticipation of the highest-traffic weekend in history, the team had done in-depth load testing and purchased additional server and database capacity to meet the projected demand. But, with today’s traffic, an unanticipated variable arose that caused some issues with chat and with pages loading.
The team pushed out a fix and services were fully restored by 11:20 a.m. CDT. If you have services this evening or this week, the platform is performing at full capability! Apps and sites across the entire Internet were affected by this global movement of people attending church online—Facebook Live, YouTube, Boxcast, Zoom, and others had failures during that peak morning window. But, it’s a matter of perspective. We love how Aaron from Abundant Grace Community Church put it! “So not only has the Church broken down the 4 walls, but we also broke the Internet! I’m thankful for that! Millions around the world gathered to lift up the name of Jesus!” And in spite of the downtime in some of our Church Online services, God still moved in 28,000 people who clicked the Salvation Moment through Church Online!
We’re already hard at work supporting the rest of this week’s services and scaling up for next weekend, and the team is working with Google and other 3rd-party vendors to assess and increase our capacity again. Please know we are working our hardest and putting as much of our resources toward the platform as possible.
Please plan to tune into this week's service Sunday at 10:30: saintphilips.online.church. We will post links to this week's bulletin later in the week.