Tendulkar breaks Cricinfo records

Sachin Tendulkar's record-breaking didn't stop on the field on February 24. He shattered many on Cricinfo. We recorded 45 million page views that day, and our highest number of unique users in India and the United States. The match report for the Gwalior ODI became Cricinfo's single most read piece of content.

It has always been so. If evidence was ever needed to confirm Tendulkar's status as the world's most-adored cricketer, it can be found in our logs. Month after month, year after year, he remains the most-searched cricketer on Cricinfo; by a huge margin, his profile page is the most visited player page on the site; and in any given month, headlines (often more than one) featuring his name are among the top 10 on the site.

Among other things, he also broke a couple of our servers that day.

Trust me, we make serious contingency plans for peak moments, and certainly we have never underestimated your love for Tendulkar. But obviously, there is no accounting for it. As he stood a couple of runs away from making history, so many of you logged in together that our servers blinked. It was a desperate few minutes, but in a sense, it was also a moment of vindication of your faith in us. Many of you got on Twitter to vent your frustration, and there was one post that stood out: "You know you are large when you crash Cricinfo."

We hope to be ready for the next peak. We have just ordered some Tendulkar servers.