Justin Kan describes an early Twitch outage when only co-founder Kyle understood the video system. While Kyle vacationed in Lake Tahoe, the system crashed and the team couldn't reach him, so they hired a pizza delivery driver to ring his doorbell and tell him the site was down. Kyle woke up, fixed it, and joked they should have sent pizza since he was hungry.
Chapters
Another one that I actually liked that was kind of fun but was stressful at the time was— so my co-founder Kyle went on vacation to Lake Tahoe, and he was the only one who knew how the video system worked at the time. You know, we didn't have— you know, people ask what your bus number is. Your bus number is like if someone gets hit by a bus, like how many people have to get hit by a bus before you like— there's complete system failure. And our bus number was 1, right? Right? So like, if Kyle was gone, the video system had no redundancy. It was down. We didn't know how to fix it. So of course, he left, he was in Tahoe, the video system is down. Before he left, he's like, I'm gonna have my cell phone, laptop, whatever, right? So video system goes down, we start calling Kyle, no answer. You know? Bus of one just hit. Yeah. We're like, Emmett, you figure it out. My other co-founder's the CTO, and he was like trying to figure it out, You know, he didn't really know the system that well. So we're like, how do we get in touch with him? He's like, we called him like 10 times, you know, like, this call's 15, right? Like, we were calling him like every 30 seconds for like 20 minutes and like no response. So we ended up, Michael, my co-founder Michael, had this idea. He calls Lake Tahoe, he calls a pizza place, and he's like, go to this address and order a pizza. Ring the doorbell and tell them— send one of your drivers to this address, ring the doorbell and tell them the website is down. And the guy's like, what kind of pizza do you want? And he's like, don't make a pizza, just go right now. I'll buy— I'll pay for like a large cheese pizza or whatever. Like, I'll just pay you. You just send your driver and go. And they're like, you don't want a pizza? So he eventually communicated, go to this address. So the guy goes and rings the doorbell, and Kyle wakes up. He was taking a nap or something in the other room with his cell phone, like, you know, across the room from him, wakes up, and the guy's like, the website's down. He like gets up and fixes it. And then he calls us and he's like, you guys should have sent a pizza. Like, I'm hungry. Mm.
