PARIS — French soccer fans crashed adult studio Marc Dorcel’s servers after the producer offered free VOD when the French national team qualified for the 2014 World Cup on Tuesday night.
Team “Le Bleus” played in the return leg of the crucial play-off game against Ukraine and pulled out a 3-0 victory.
Dorcel reportedly said that if the team won, his site would be accessible “for free all night, to celebrate.”And the fans took advantage.
The producer said the victory created so much traffic it caused his site’s servers to crash after only 45 seconds, and told Euronews that users were still accessing his VOD library several hours after the final whistle, logging in 100 times more traffic than usual.
All of the activity caused Dorcel to set up an ad hoc email address where fans could write to get an access code that was quickly flooded with “tens of thousands of e-mails” from fans who had until noon today to get their code.
Dorcel maintained that the move was not a marketing ploy, but rather a way to cheer on the national team.
