Could the Speedy Tuesday 2 website malfunctioning have been avoided

On one hand, managing flash sales like this is hard: it's clear that lots of companies have trouble with this, including companies like Ticketmaster who should care enough to do this well; since they have trouble, it's presumably actually hard.

On the other hand, in my experience, this is not all that hard for smart engineering teams who actually care about it. Selling 2,000 watches to a few thousand customers over a few minutes is not a lot of load. I've built large-scale payments systems which can do thousands of sales per second, and while it's not trivial, computers are now really big and really fast, and if you don't need something like this to be up 24/7, the problem gets simpler.

That said, it's not surprising to me at all that a company like Swatch, who, as big as they are, aren't online transaction/service experts, may struggle with this. (And who knows if this project had access to Swatch Group resources or was just done within Omega.) I have had the benefit of working in very technically savvy environments, and I recognize that things that are easy for us may not be easy for all.

Same for me. I did everything from start to finish on my 6S. It froze a few times but always restarted. The ‘add 5 mins’ also worked for me.