Marcus Thomas & The Mega Millions Lottery
What does it take to serve up a billion-dollar jackpot (five times)?
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Results at a Glance
- $1.602B Mega Millions Jackpot On 8/8/2023
- 9,652 Peak Visitors Per Second (8/8/2023)
- 4,267,668 Visitors Served Between 11:00PM and 11:10PM (8/8/2023)
- 5 Billion-Dollar Drawings Supported (2022–2024)
The Client
When the Mega Millions jackpot hits record levels, millions of visitors rush to the website to check the winning numbers.
Marcus Thomas, a Cleveland-based marketing agency, partners with DataYard to keep the Mega Millions website fast and available, both on the biggest drawing nights and every day in between. While Marcus Thomas focuses on the website design and the Mega Millions brand, DataYard builds, maintains, and operates the network and server infrastructure behind it.
Five Billion-Dollar Drawings
Between 2022 and 2024, the jackpot surpassed $1 billion five times, and DataYard scaled the Mega Millions website for every one of those drawings:
- July 29, 2022 $1.337 billion
- January 13, 2023 $1.348 billion
- August 8, 2023 Record$1.602 billion
- March 26, 2024 $1.128 billion
- December 27, 2024 $1.269 billion
On the Biggest Nights
The First of the Five
More than 37 million visitors flocked to the Mega Millions website in the hours after the numbers were announced, and at its peak, more than half a million visitors per minute were using the site to see if they needed to go to work the next morning.
The Record
In August 2023, the jackpot climbed to $1.602 BILLION dollars, the largest jackpot in Mega Millions history to date. Yes, that's billion with a B. More than 4.2 million visitors reached the site in just the first ten minutes after that drawing, and at one point we were serving nearly 10,000 visitors per second!
DataYard knows these figures because our team runs the infrastructure behind the site. While most people those nights were wondering if they had the winning numbers, DataYard’s team of experienced and dedicated engineers was taking steps to improve their online experience.
It takes some technical beef to serve millions of web visitors. DataYard has the know-how and the chutzpah to pull it all together.
Scaled Up for the Rush, Back Down After
Ahead of each big drawing, the DataYard team scales up the environment based on past traffic patterns and the size of the jackpot, so the extra capacity is in place before visitors arrive. Once the rush passes, the environment scales back down, so the site isn't paying for peak capacity the rest of the year.
I Sleep Soundly.
“I have to confess, sometimes I go to bed totally forgetting that a major drawing is happening overnight. That is how much trust I have in the cloud solutions DataYard provides for the Mega Millions Lottery.”
The Challenge
Scalability was the primary challenge. On non-drawing days, the site generally experiences a steady stream of a few thousand visitors. However, a few nights a week, traffic can spike dramatically to millions of visitors within a very short timeframe. This irregular but intense traffic surge demands a robust and scalable infrastructure to help prevent downtime and maintain optimal performance during peak periods.
The Solution
To handle sudden jumps from a few thousand visitors to millions, DataYard built the Mega Millions environment around five core pieces.
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Flexible server design to host applications at scale.
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Geographically diverse infrastructure for redundancy, reducing exposure to single points of failure and improving the site’s resiliency.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN) and front-end cache to distribute data quickly and efficiently, regardless of the users’ location.
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Next-generation firewalls to protect the infrastructure against bad actors, including safeguards against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
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Decades of experience building and operating high-performance servers running on public networks.
The Result
Across all five billion-dollar Mega Millions drawings, the solution put in place handled the peak traffic surges without a single dropped page.
As uptime requirements and website traffic increase in the coming years, we’re confident we’ll continue to deliver industry-leading service for this record-breaking lottery game. If we can do this for five of the billion-dollar nights in Mega Millions history, imagine what we can do for your business!