Archived: Demand for Digital Services During Today’s Disruption

As expected, we saw very significant demand for digital services during this morning’s disruption as torrential rain and signal failures affected a number of Tube and Rail lines. 

Website Traffic - June 23 morning peak
TfL website traffic during the June 23 morning peak, showing a significant increase on yesterday, and the same time last week

  • Web and API – Demand is split across our direct channels (such as web) and our indirect channels (open data/unified API), both of which saw significant increases this morning.
  • Cloud autoscaling – The cloud environment (Neon was the live environment at the time out of our three live ‘candidate’ environments – Neon, Argon and Radon) auto–scaled seamlessly to meet the demand and no interventions were necessary to maintain normal performance and availability.
  • Release deployment – We had sufficient confidence in the stability of the environments to deploy a release today, moving up to 4.6.1 of the API and Web, now on the Argon environment.  Releases are seamless through our blue/green deployment process, so no customers would have noticed the deployment, which means they are done in office hours.
  • Preparations for evening peak – We expect a very busy evening peak on web and API, should service issues on the network continue.  We continue to monitor the environments but as with this morning, we don’t expect any interventions to be required as automation should channel the necessary capacity to where it is needed.

Analytics Summary

  • Hourly traffic – website – During today’s peak hourly traffic, 6am-10am, we received 582k visits from 570k unique visitors accessing over 2 million pages of content.  Overall traffic is more that 2x normal.
  • Busiest hour – Peak traffic this morning occurred between 8am-9am and reached 163k visits, with 159k unique visitors consuming 561k pages of content. This is around 3x that of the previous day.
  • Top Content – The status update landing page received 232k visits (15x normal) during peak hours and was the most popular content, closely followed by the homepage and journey planner results.
  • API usage – Between the hours of 6am-9am today api calls doubled, to 5.2 million from yesterday’s 2.6 million

    API usage June 23
    API usage during the morning peak on June 23 was double that of yesterday
Hosting infrastructure
A view of the key metrics from our hosting infrastructure as we approach the evening peak

Disruption Notifications on Twitter

You can now subscribe to major disruption notifications on Twitter, with alerts delivered via direct messages. This service is available for all Tube lines, London Overground, DLR and TfL Rail, and subscribers will be notified when a disruption means significant delays or an alternative route is required.

Find out more about this service, including how to subscribe, in this blog post.

 

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