The Facebook Engineering Team, on how they catered their infrastructure to support the “Look Back” videos which popped up early February:
To plan for even more load, we began with some educated guesses, put them through some back-of-the-envelope math, and decided to plan for 25 million videos shared within a day of the anniversary. We estimated that for every video shared, five people would watch that video. Multiplying those views by the video size, dividing by seconds in a day, we calculated that we would need an average additional bandwidth of about 62 Gbps. Since traffic can be 2-3x higher at peak, we actually needed to plan for 187 Gbps.
And then, after launch:
Shortly after 12:00 pm Pacific time, Look Back videos were going out at over 450 Gbps – which is big even by Facebook standards.
Wow. Such bandwidth. Much amaze.