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FYRE FESTIVAL

Website & hosting platform
Exumas, Bahamas · 2017

Case study / 06

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The Fyre Festival homepage: the Fyre logo, April 28–30 and May 5–7 2017, Exumas, with a Play Video button over a close-up from the launch film

(Overview)

The festival never happened. The website did exactly what it promised.

Fyre was pitched as the most exclusive music festival ever staged: private islands in the Exumas, supermodels, jewel-blue water. New York agency Matte Projects created the brand and the launch film, then brought in Tokyo Digital as its digital partner to build the website and the platform to host it.

The ask was a site as immersive as the promise, fronted by the full-screen launch film on a mobile-first build. It also had to cope with a launch the client said would draw millions of visitors on day one. Everyone says that. This time, it came true.

Client
Fyre Festival
My role
Technical Program Manager, Tokyo Digital
Agency
Tokyo Digital
In partnership with
Matte Projects, New York
Scope
Website, Craft CMS, ticketing integration, AWS hosting
Year
2017

(Launch day)

6,000,000+

Visitors in the first three hours. Zero downtime.

01

Selling paradise

The site had to feel as luxurious as the brand Matte had built. That meant the launch film full-screen on a phone, then a calm, sparse journey through the island, the program, the packages and a treasure hunt. It was all sunsets, turquoise water and hand-drawn maps, with ticket buying never more than a tap away.

The site menu: Home, The Island, The Hunt, The Program, The Journey, The Packages, The Experience, FAQ
The Journey page: This journey begins with a departure from the everyday
The Hunt page: A treasure hunt of exceptional proportions
The Program page with a sunset over the sea
The Packages page over an illustrated island map
The Experience page: Like all great stories, this is a voyage
02

Built for the stampede

The client said to expect over a million visitors an hour after launch, driven by influencers and global media, and Tokyo's technical leads planned as if it were true. The site was cached at edge locations worldwide, in front of load-balanced web servers that scaled themselves as traffic rose. The database ran across multiple zones, and images came from S3. Tickets were sold through a third-party platform over an API, with cache purging so availability stayed accurate.

EdgeCloudFront, worldwide
BalanceLoad balancers, US-East
ScaleAuto-scaling web servers
StoreMulti-AZ database · S3
  • Craft CMS
  • AWS CloudFront
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • EC2 auto scaling
  • Multi-AZ database
  • Amazon S3
  • Ticketing API
Aerial shot of speedboats crossing turquoise shallows off a white-sand beach
03

What happened next

The rest is well documented. Weeks after launch, bands began pulling out and the festival collapsed. Guests landed to disaster-relief tents, and the site took a second traffic spike for less enviable reasons. Tokyo, like many partners, was left with unpaid invoices. When the team pushed for payment, the client moved the domain to a hastily built replacement. The site itself never went down.

The homepage over an aerial shot of boats in turquoise water
The Retreat page: Dream, Hearth, Mind, Rest
The site footer over a sandbar and a moored yacht
04

My role

As Technical Program Manager at Tokyo Digital, I managed the delivery of the website and the project to an unusually fast, high-pressure timeline. Tokyo's technical leads designed and set up the infrastructure. My job was keeping design, build, the ticketing integration, Matte in New York and the client moving together, so the site launched on time and held.

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