Chess.com servers struggle to keep pace with platform's recent growth surge

If you are a chess fan facing outage issues playing the game on the popular Chess.com platform, don’t be alarmed. Chess.com recently confirmed that it was experiencing a strain on its servers due to the platform’s surge in traffic.

Chess.com recently reported that its traffic nearly doubled since the beginning of December 2022 and that its servers were struggling, especially during peak hours, typically around noon to 04:00 pm ET. According to the company’s official blog, the servers were collapsing under the excess load, triggering a 502 error.
The report notes that Chess.com had seven million active members on December 31, 2022, in a single day. However, the figure rose to ten million active members on January 20, nearly doubling since the beginning of December 2022. This was a major reason for the database connection error and is not one that Chess.com could resolve with a simple push of a button.

Despite the current hurdles, the growth at Chess.com is still a positive sign for both the website and chess in general. Chess.com was founded in 2017 but experienced a surge in growth starting 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the website’s growth continued even after the pandemic.

In its blog post, Chess.com noted, “31,700,000 games were played on January 20 alone, a site record, and we are now regularly seeing more than one million games an hour. 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average). People are adding friends. They are commenting, chatting, and doing awesome chess things. All of this generates data that needs to be written to our databases.”

Chess.com did say that it was adding more server hardware to address the recent increases in traffic. The blog noted. “We have shipments arriving with the most powerful possible live chess and database servers this week.” Chess.com describes the server issue as a technical bottleneck that involves “unscalable” parts of the platform. However, some stability is expected to be restored in the short terms.