Early Instagram

Medium: “9am: Kevin and I panic as our tiny server crumbles under the weight of our first-day traffic.”

In this day of large scale systems it’s hard to believe Instagram launched with a single server, which promptly melted down under the strain.

On Wednesday, October 6, 2010, Instagram launched its mobile photo sharing service for iPhone. In six hours, the back-end operation, which was running off a single machine in Los Angeles, was completely overwhelmed.

That’s from a 2011 Mashable article. I’d love to know how many boxes Instagram runs off of today. This stuff fascinates me.