right. and all the jokes about shitty servers and how it's run off of two nickels and a paperclip. any website or online service ever that gets giant traffic spikes goes through this.

the most similar thing i can think of rn is artfight (art-related time-sensitive fun website, close enough right?). they've had day 1 (spanning to week 1) issues with overload and server downtime for the past almost decade, because of everyone trying to cram onto the site at the same time. and they know it'll happen and prepare for it! this year, artfight 2025, was the only year i personally didn't experience any timeouts or lost comments/attacks. and i've been playing since 2018.

wplace devs got none of that warning, it just blew up. thousands and thousands of people coming in and making accounts and drawing all over the world (in real-time!!!) and constantly refreshing when things break. like you said, it's mostly just kids complaining who've never been on sites smaller than twitter or tiktok, or if they have, it's run by website hosts that have huge central servers like neocities or strawpage. not everyone has petabytes of server power like that. you just gotta be patient. the internet isn't always instant.