The popularity of chess is nothing new. It is one of mankind's most enduring games, and our ancestors have played some version of it since (at least) the 6th century; in the 20th century, it was sparked by world championship games like Fischer vs. Spassky and Kasparov vs. Karpov. [While the great players remain in the 21st century, arguably greater than ever, the game's booming popularity in the last couple of years is probably due to the huge success of the Netflix show "The Queen's Gambit," the knock-on effect of Covid's Lockdown, and the fact that playing other humans in It may be due to the simple fact that quick games are only seconds away on a cell phone or PC.

This continued surge in popularity has now reached a level that Chess.com, the de facto home of online gaming, is seriously struggling to deal with. I play regularly on this platform and have found it less reliable than usual in recent months. There have been numerous times when a game in progress would drop without warning, or the service would appear to be down altogether.

The platform has now posted a statement (opens in new tab) acknowledging the problem, explaining why and what it is doing now and in the future to mitigate the problem. on January 20, 2023, 10 million users visited the site and since the beginning of December Traffic has almost doubled, he said. 'Our servers are struggling,' he said. But sadly, there is no easy button (yet) that can be pushed to solve these problems."

On why Chess.com believes the game's popularity has skyrocketed so dramatically, setting new active player records for all but five days this month, and the Chess.com app is now #2 (#1 in some countries) in the top free games category on iOS in the US He continues, stating, "We are very proud of the fact that we are now the number one free game on iOS." On January 20 alone, 31,700,000 games were played, which is a site record, and we are now regularly seeing over 1 million games per hour."

As for the reasons behind this growth, the site points to more than one factor. While it acknowledges that things like the Queen's Gambit and Lockdown have had a big impact, it also points to other things, such as: the most popular social media post of 2022, in which soccer players Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo play chess, Last year's absolutely explosive story (opens in new tab) of world champion Magnus Carlsen suing his opponent for cheating (Chess.com notes that the drama was subsequently fueled by a lawsuit and "ridiculous 'device' allegations," namely allegations that the accused was using vibrating anal beads (which it tersely notes was fueled), the general growth of entertaining chess streamers, and Mittens.

Mittens is becoming a home-grown Chess.com meme. It's a chess AI with a cute cat avatar that beats your ass and then says something stupid like "meow."

So there are lots of reasons for the expansion of chess in general; Chess.com invested in hardware and scaling during the Queen's Gambit boom, and now they are "experiencing a whole new level of scaling problems. Basically, with over 250,000 new accounts being created every day and the site's features (it should be said that Chess.com offers much more than just playing chess with others), they say their database cannot handle the current volume of data.

Chess.com is spending more money on hardware and cloud infrastructure, stating that "a ship is arriving this week with the most powerful live chess server and database server possible." However, it is not as easy as adding more servers, and bottlenecks continue to appear, and the site "continues to work to find (both proactively and reactively) areas of Chess.com that are not scalable and make them more scalable."

It describes database improvements ("there is a huge amount of data to move") and says that future outages are intended to be more "graceful," meaning that the site should be able to recover more quickly.

"Honestly, this sucks," says the Chess.com statement.

"We know you are here to play chess and have fun. It is very frustrating when you are looking for a game and instead you get a 502 error or the game times out. We are not taking this issue lightly, and in 2-3 weeks we will be making some major changes to properly handle the next wave of chess craze"

.

The next couple of weeks may be a bit bumpy at Chess.com, but there has never been a better time to be a chess fan. The Internet has completely changed the way we enjoy, learn, play, and watch the game in a few short decades, plus various advances in AI have created a new landscape: in a sense, the machines have won, and they are now the companions and teachers of the computer age of chess. Your move

.