The Ultimate Stress Test: Kim Jong Un, a Parachute, and a Multi-Billion Dollar Prop Bet
We’ve all seen the meme: Kim Jong Un Looking at Things. But during Super Bowl LX, prediction markets gave us a new entry: Kim Jong Un Looking at a 504 Gateway Timeout.
While SRE teams were monitoring CPU usage, they forgot to test for the most dangerous variable in software engineering: The Geo-Political Whale. Specifically, the scenario where the Supreme Leader bets the entire North Korean GDP on a single prop bet: “Will Dennis Rodman Parachute into the Stadium?”
It sounds like a joke, but the consequences were real. Kalshi, a leading prediction market, suffered a major outage during the Super Bowl. They likely ran synthetic simulations, but they didn’t test with real production data and volumes—a mistake that cost them millions in lost revenue and refunds.
The Lie of Synthetic Users
Synthetic load tests (k6, JMeter) program an “Ideal User.” They log in, place a bet, and wait politely.
Real users don’t do that. Real users are panic-refreshing. They are screaming at the TV. And when Dennis Rodman appears in the sky, they don’t distribute traffic evenly—they all hit the same “Buy” button at the exact same millisecond.
This creates write-heavy contention that synthetic scripts miss. A script tests connection handling; reality tests database locking. Kalshi’s matching engine didn’t just face high traffic; it faced a synchronized “thundering herd.”
The Solution: Don’t Script. Replay.
The tragedy of the crash is that the data to prevent it already existed.
Two weeks prior, the Conference Championships provided a “mini-spike” with the exact same DNA: panic-selling, burst patterns, and chaotic write-ratios. Most teams delete these logs. That is a mistake. That traffic was your dress rehearsal.
The Speedscale Strategy: Capture, Amplify, Replay
To survive the next massive event, stop guessing and start replaying.
- Capture the “Mini-Spike”: Record the incoming requests from a smaller, real-world event (like the playoffs).
- Amplify the Chaos: Use Speedscale to replay that messy, imperfect traffic against your staging environment. But don’t just replay it 1. Multiply it by 10x.
- Stress the “Hot Spots”: Watch your Order Matching Engine lock up in staging because 50,000 “real” users are trying to update the same Postgres row simultaneously—before it happens in production.
Synthetic tests verify code. Traffic Replay verifies architecture. Don’t wait for the next dictator to test your limits. Take your actual worst day, multiply it by ten, and replay it until you’re bulletproof.