The church's Web site planners and their technology partner, IBM, had anticipated first-day traffic of maybe 120,000 visitors. But by 8:30 in the morning on May 24 — half an hour before the official launch — the number of hits put the site on a pace for 300,000 users. By day's end, 400,000 users had logged on — and an estimated 600,000 more had tried and failed to get through one of the Web's worst traffic jams ever.

The site managers dealt with the gridlock with the computerized version of crowd control. “When you go to a restaurant, there are only a certain number of seats,” site software developer Justin Lindsey of LavaStorm explained in the computer trade journal InfoWorld. “You have to make sure you take care of the people in the seats and get to the people in line as fast as you can, and that's exactly what we did.... We'd recognize you as coming from a particular location and put you in pool A or B and say ‘We'll serve you in 30 minutes and you'll get 30 minutes on the site.’”