Case Study: Virginia Department of Elections achieves 100% availability and handles 200% traffic surges with Akamai Technologies

The Virginia Department of Elections Serves Election Night Results without Fail Using Akamai Solutions

The Virginia Department of Elections (elections.virginia.gov) needed to deliver timely, accurate election-night results to citizens and the media but repeatedly suffered outages from massive flash crowds and page‑scraping bots—most notably in November 2014 when the site received over 1 million hits in four hours—forcing emergency redirects, server rebuilds and hundreds of press inquiries. With a small IT team, the agency’s priorities were to eliminate outages and simplify infrastructure so staff could focus on results rather than server management.

The department implemented Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator and NetStorage to cache and serve election results (refreshed every 10 minutes), offloading origin servers and gaining a 100% availability SLA and an easy control panel. The solution reduced server load by 100%, handled traffic spikes up to 200% (including 25 million hits in five hours), eliminated outage-related press calls and removed the need for frequent temporary server deployments.

Virginia Department Of Elections

Matthew J. Davis

Chief Information Officer