In the last 24 hours we experienced too many people trying to broadcast at once. As a result this maxed out the connections on our video ingest servers causing buffering, freezing, and a lot of dropped frames. This was primarily an issue on the Chicago and Denver ingest servers.

A few moments ago we pushed an updated to our video ingest servers to protect them from being overloaded. If you are a streamer (broadcaster) and you cannot connect to an ingest server, this is most likely because that server has reached its threshold and is denying your connection to prevent it from overloading and crashing. As a side note, we made it where VIPs can connect to any ingest server regardless of its connection utilization.

I know what you’re saying… “sure, you’re using that as an excuse to make people buy VIP”. You would be 100% wrong. Much like the video servers at capacity message that happens when our edge servers get overloaded, the ingest overload protection retains a certain amount of overhead which can be utilized. And since there are far less VIPs than free users we felt this is safe to be utilized by VIPs without sacrificing stability.

So what are we doing besides denying connections to protect the ingest servers? We’re in the process of doubling the bandwidth capacity of our Chicago ingest server as well as working on adding additional ingest servers to keep up with growth.