Apple Tablet Event Kills Live Blogging Site CoverItLive
Internet infrastructure still can't handle peak events. The live blogging service CoverItLive, for example, has been crushed, and is down — presumably because of all the interest in Apple's tablet event, going on now.
Context & Ripple Effects
CoverItLive arrived two years ago as the go-to third-party layer for live event coverage — hailed by reviewers as the ultimate liveblogging tool, and used for marquee moments like Engadget's live blog of Steve Jobs' Macworld 2008 keynote. Its whole pitch was that a small newsroom could bolt on real-time coverage without building its own infrastructure.
That bet is being tested at exactly the wrong moment: on January 27, 2010, with Apple holding its San Francisco tablet event amid heavy online interest and rumors of a larger iPhone-like device, the service is down — crushed, per Silicon Alley Insider, by the very kind of tentpile-traffic spike it exists to serve. The failure lands on one of the highest-interest product events of the year, when liveblogs are the primary channel for readers who cannot watch the keynote.
First-order effects
- Newsrooms running their Apple event coverage through CoverItLive lose their liveblog channel mid-keynote, forcing them to fall back to plain text posts or redirect readers to competitors' feeds at the moment audience attention peaks.
- CoverItLive takes its worst reputational damage precisely where its value proposition is strongest — big scheduled events — after positioning itself in 2008 as the tool for exactly these moments.
Second-order effects
- Rival live-blogging tools and self-hosted setups get an immediate opening, as publishers weigh whether a single vendor's capacity should be a single point of failure for tentpole-event coverage.
- Capacity-at-scale becomes the competitive differentiator among liveblog providers, shifting sales conversations from features (polls, moderation, embeds) to whether the platform survives a predictable, calendar-known traffic surge.
Third-order effects
- If every major Apple launch keeps acting as an unplanned stress test, live event publishing drifts toward elastically scaled platforms or publisher-owned infrastructure, squeezing out thin single-tenant services.
- The pattern points to peak-load resilience becoming a baseline procurement requirement for media infrastructure, not a premium feature — vendors serving newsrooms are judged by their worst hour.
The trend: Predictable mega-events like Apple launches repeatedly exposing the fragility of thin third-party web infrastructure, pushing live media publishing toward platforms built for known peak loads.