I've read this story a few times and I always have a few problems with it. 1. The total population of New Zealand is 4 million. Expecting 1 million concurrent

I've read this story a few times and I always have a few problems with it. 1. The total population of New Zealand is 4 million. Expecting 1 million concurrent users on the service is very optimistic. Also Myspace wasn't that popular in New Zealand, these days facebook dominates but previous Bebo was common among young people. 2. Testing from EC2 instances against Akamai will not simulate load from NZers. The December 2009 the closest EC2 servers to NZ were in the US so traffic would have been pushing completely different servers. 3. A transfer rate of 16Gb/s almost certainly exceeds any spare capacity in the New Zealand Internet. Also there are less than a dozen Akamai clusters in NZ, distributed unevenly and probably most don't have more than 1GB/s connections. So while it's a nice story, if they were really testing just for NZ they spent a lot of time and money testing the wrong thing. Perhaps it could be a story about how inflated marketing expectations cause cost to be incurred by engineering?