Halo 3 is going to break the Internet

I mentioned that when the Halo 3 beta was available on Xbox Live, it would bring Live to its knees. I was mostly right, as it took forever for some people to download the beta. But now something even worse is probably going to happen: I’m pretty sure that Halo 3 is going to break the internet. It simply cannot support the demand for bits and bytes that the millions of denizens of Halo 3 demand. There are many reasons for this. Here are a few:

When it’s all said and done, there will have millions of multiplayer matches played. As we speak, thousands are going on simultaneously. (There were 500k+ Halo 3 players on Live when I logged off to post this)

With the most excellent playback feature now part of the package, players can review and obsess over every little detail of each one of their matches. They can also share and upload videos and take thousands of in-game screen shots. Of course 95% of those screen shots and videos are boring and crappy, but a few gems shine through (see below). But with all these tools at the disposal of millions of players, the internet is going to be worse for the wear. Videos galore being uploaded to YouTube (almost 50k at the time of this posting) and thousands of screenshots being uploaded to Flickr (12k+ at the time of posting)

Of course, I’m part of the problem, not the solution:

That whimpering sound you hear are the servers, switches, and routers around the world.