How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW)

#BreakTheInternet?

On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website (NSFW). It linked together all of these things—and other articles, too—under the “#breaktheinternet” hashtag.

This image is just a gradient between the brightest, shiniest color of Kim Kardashian’s butt and the darkest, shadowiest color of her butt.

There was one part of the Internet that PAPER didn’t want to break: The part that was serving up millions of copies of Kardashian’s nudes over the web.

Hosting that butt is an impressive feat. You can’t just put Kim Kardashian nudes on the Internet and walk away —that would be like putting up a tent in the middle of a hurricane. Your web server would melt. You need to plan.

#Don’tBreakThisPartPlease

During the first week of November the PAPER people got in touch with the people who run their website, and said:

“We may get a lot of traffic.”