The Internet is just no match for the Swifties. Ahead of the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the pop star teamed up with Google to release some puzzles for her fans to solve that would give them a sneak peek at the album. But Google’s systems were unable to handle the influx of traffic from her puzzle-loving fans.
Starting Sept. 19, anyone who typed “Taylor Swift” into Google Search got tiles of letters popping up on their screen and a hint to help unscramble them into a word or phrase that related to the 1989 album era. Solving the puzzle sent you on to a new one — there were 89 total, and Swift promised to release four of the five vault track titles that would appear on the album once fans collectively solved 33 million puzzles.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for Google to run into problems from the high volume of traffic. The puzzles went down for a while, but fortunately Google was able to fix the problem with enough time for the Swifties to solve 33 million puzzles in a single day. The last time there was a Taylor Swift-related Internet problem was not so easy a fix when Ticketmaster crashed from an overwhelming volume of traffic during presales for the singer’s Eras Tour. That resulted in a federal hearing in which Ticketmaster blamed bots for overwhelming its servers.
