Only the final sixty seconds remained on the red countdown at the center of the screen.
The curve on the network traffic monitoring chart was still fairly smooth.
This was only the calm before the storm.
"Load balancer status is normal," the technical director reported, staring at the row of monitors in front of him. "The backup server clusters are already online and on standby, and bandwidth redundancy has been reserved at three hundred percent. As long as we don't run into a large-scale DDoS attack, we can swallow ordinary concurrent requests."
Frank took a sip of bitter coffee.
Nakayama Takuya's suggestion had been very clear: use free email and suspense marketing to drive all of America's netizens into this one square.
They had agreed to the plan as well, and over the past few days, they had witnessed the Internet's attention on them.
The hardware costs had been calculated down to the last detail when the project was approved. What had to be verified now was Silicon Valley Online's capacity.
Ten seconds.
Five seconds.
Three.
Two.
One.
The numbers on the screen hit zero.
Inside an office building in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Richard sat at his workstation, a bit of sweat beading in the palm of the hand gripping his mouse.
On his computer screen, the black-background, white-letter "G0" page automatically refreshed, and where the countdown had been, a black-text refresh button on a white background appeared.
He quickly pressed the left mouse button.
The progress bar at the top of the browser froze for less than half a second, then shot to full speed.
A brand-new world unfolded before his eyes.
There was no long, complicated welcome message.
At the very top of the page was a clean search bar, with Webdir navigation jump buttons lined