Used to work for a gaming company that had a really big Facebook presence.
When most companies launched a new game they would just launch the game connect to Facebook and call it a day.
But when we launched a new game we would turn on cross-promotion and send millions of users to the new game day one.
The problem is that Facebooks load balancers don’t scale quickly. And if you start sending millions of people to a game that just errors, it’s pretty bad for marketing.
So we had a script that you would run for an hour before you went to launch a game that would start making hundreds then thousands than tens of thousands of connections to Facebook giving their load balancers time to scale.
Well, I didn’t write the tool I was just given it and the documentation on it was kind of sparse at the time. I started with the value of 30,000. Weeeellll, turns out a sane value would have been 3-5 as it multiplied whatever input you gave it by 10K.
My cluster made sweet love with their cluster, and Facebook went down for about 3 hours.
Within a week they had some pretty decent changes to their new API limit subsystem.