Here’s a wonderful and accurate representation of that night.
I always felt this didn’t fully encapsulate the entire [S] Cascade experience, because first, this upd8 was something that we had been waiting for for WEEKS. A literally unprecedented wait period at the time. We were used to suckling at the teat of daily updates, a constant stream of conversation and plot twists and buildup, and as EOA5, we were finally going to figure out what all these countdowns and plot threads and disconnected elements were building up for.
And when the progress bar reached 100%, and when the page FINALLY loaded on 10/25/11, it was chaos. This was 2011, a primetime peak point and growth period of Homestuck fan density, meaning hiatus memes were popping up faster than furious fanfictions and fanarts theorizing about what was going to happen next. On tumblr, you couldn’t avoid Homestuck even if you tried, which meant a lot of curious people were constantly starting to read HS to see what the fuss was about, and was a direct precursor to the huge amount of liveblogs that started up after EOA5. MSPA crashed, as it had started to during the last few big [S] updates. Hussie had already bought new servers in advance, but even when allegedly thousands of dollars were spent it couldn’t handle the accidental DDOS attack of Homestuck fans. People were up all night waiting for this upd8, the curiosity was killing me. I know at some point he was receiving at least 1 million unique visitors per day to his site, and even though Hussie had foreseen such traffic and thusly hosted [S] Cascade on Newgrounds, a dedicated video streaming site, Newgrounds was similarly unprepared for the sheer amount of people frantically mashing the play and refresh buttons, and also crashed.
MSPA and Newgrounds crashed definitively for at least two nights in a row, I remember not being able to see the entire update until three days later, even though I kept checking back and refreshing. For a lucky few, the loading bar would stop at 23-30%, where they would then frantically troubleshoot on the MSPA forums and of course, tumblr. For an even luckier few, they could see a tiny bit of the upd8 (spoiler: Jade died) before the whole thing froze, and then when they refreshed and refreshed just like a million other people the whole site disappeared.
Andrew Hussie has gone on record to say this was one of the few times he thought Homestuck wasn’t worth it, because the sheer unbelievable cost (was it $10,000?) of servers and the chaos of no one able to see the upd8 and crashing nearly every site after.
He was tweeting during the whole debacle, stating he was reluctant to put it up on Youtube because of all the moving elements of the flash, and style, and how youtube degraded the quality of the file size, and how he tried to scratch out buffer time and pauses by putting periods of silence between each section of the 15 minute upd8, the longest upd8 yet. It was also a legendarily good EOA, which didn’t help the hype in the least.
So after Newgrounds patooted, he didn’t put it on youtube and instead put up the entire flash file on Megaupload, where it could be downloaded in it’s entirety to be watched. UNFORTUNATELY, Megaupload also crashed. But before that happened I managed to get the file!
At this point a meme was born. Tumblr also crashed for a few hours in this time period, which I think was in part due to the amount of frantic posting going on, and at least two other sites I can’t remember crashed as well, even definitely Twitter and Youtube briefly? I am positive at least one streaming site crashed when people who tried to livestream the upd8. I went from one video to another trying to get at it, but each one fell into a loading buffer and then subsequently became unwatchable. Many people who were not Homestuck were confused on why all the major sites were suddenly crashing, which was kind of really hilarious because though everyone expected at least two sites to crash, the internet coincidentally went down on that day in the exact order of the HS fandom moving from site to site trying to watch the upd8.
Spoilers were flying everywhere, people didn’t understand everything that had happened, and by the time the timeline of events was all straightened out, people became even MORE hype. Like this whole thing lasted at least four days, and on top of that, the upd8 was good. Fandom exploded. Almost every super popular homestuck youtube video kind of was born of the excitement right after this upd8, leading into the weirdly ubiquitous 2012-2013 Homestuck fandom phase. But the rest is another story, and [S] Cascade was a humbling and hilarious experience.
[S] Collide and Act 7 were hosted on youtube (shortly after an official Homestuck youtube was made), after huge hiatuses, so fandom was a lot tinier and Youtube could handle what strain that was left.
I hope Hiveswap revitalizes something of the intense upd8 theorizing, because it was a lot of fun.
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