When work meets real life

I'm used to working for companies whose products never see the light of day. Products whose ideas are great, but the company itself has very little direction or focus and so customers are few and far between.

It's been an interesting transition to work for a company where the product not only matters, but is an important part of people's lives. In a nutshell, one of our main products is the pivotal component used by a major telecommunications carrier for routing all SMS/MMS (picture messages).

So, an interesting thing happened at work today. We received a customer complaint from a small telecom provider that "close to 100% of their queries failed in the first hour of January 1."

Yup, you guessed it. All those texts/picture messages that everyone sends at exactly midnight on New Year's caused our application to stop working for other customers since the traffic was so high for the major telecom company. We're still trying to figure out (from an application/infrastructure point of view) what exactly happened, but the increased traffic is something we've never seen (at least not to that degree). Personally, I'm surprised that the application didn't crash.