Argentina beat France 4-2 on penalties after a 3-3 draw in Lusail on Sunday, 18 December 2022, in what many called the greatest World Cup final ever played, and the internet's plumbing agreed. "Search recorded its highest traffic in 25 years during the final," Google chief executive Sundar Pichai tweeted afterwards. "It was like the whole world was searching about one thing." He added his own verdict: one of the best games ever, both teams superb, and "no one more deserving than Messi".
The numbers
- Google: the highest search traffic in the company's 25-year history, at the moment the world wanted the score, the records and the penalty rules at once.
- Twitter: about 24,400 tweets a second after Kylian Mbappé's second goal, the peak of the tournament, according to owner Elon Musk, who had reported around 20,000 a second earlier in the World Cup and was watching the final from the stadium.
- Toffee: 1.55 crore viewers of the final on Banglalink's streaming app, the largest audience for a single event in Bangladeshi streaming history, after 1 crore had watched Argentina's opening loss to Saudi Arabia on the same app.
What the Toffee number says
Bangladesh, a country with no team in the tournament, is one of the most Argentina-mad places on earth, and this year it watched on phones. Toffee held the free digital rights, and its 1.55 crore for the final is more than the population of Dhaka; it works out at roughly one in eleven people in the country on a single app. Television still had the bigger audience, but the mobile figure is the one broadcasters and advertisers will remember, because it was measured to the individual device. It also explains the mobile networks' evening congestion, and why Argentina's win was celebrated at 2 am in villages that had watched on a shared phone.
The infrastructure behind a record
Google's search fleet is built to absorb spikes; a record set by a football match is a marketing statistic more than an engineering problem. Twitter's was the more interesting test: seven weeks after Musk fired half the company's engineers, a widely predicted collapse during the World Cup did not happen, though the service did break in smaller ways through the tournament. Toffee's was the real stress test, and by the app's own account it held, on the same 4G networks that struggle with an ordinary Thursday evening.
The final also produced the most-liked Instagram post of all time, Messi's photographs with the trophy, which passed 60 million likes within a day. Every record from the night was set by people looking at the same thing at the same moment, which is, for one evening, what the internet was built for.
Why a live final is the hardest thing to stream
Every other kind of internet traffic is spread out. Netflix at nine in the evening is millions of people each watching a different thing from a different point in the file, and the system that delivers it caches copies close to viewers and works at its leisure.
A live final is the opposite on every count. The entire audience wants the same frames at the same instant, so caching helps very little — there is nothing to pre-position, because the content does not exist until a moment before it is wanted. On top of that, delivery is unicast: a separate stream is opened for every viewer rather than one broadcast shared by all. A million concurrent viewers is a million simultaneous connections.
And the spikes land on the goals, which is when everybody who left reloads at once. That is the shape of load that breaks a platform, and why Toffee’s number that night was an infrastructure achievement as much as an audience one.
