Case Study: The Broad Museum achieves zero downtime and 0% failure during peak ticket releases with Apica

The Broad - Customer Case Study

The Broad Museum in Los Angeles is a high-profile, free-admission contemporary art museum that quickly became a must-see destination after opening in 2015. A monthly batch-release ticketing strategy produced massive traffic spikes—over 10,000 users trying to book at once—exposing scaling bottlenecks in the checkout system, causing repeated outages, bad press, and hundreds of hours spent troubleshooting when cloud autoscaling couldn’t react fast enough.

Apica’s performance engineers built and executed a rapid testing plan that simulated real user behavior, running 100+ tests in a week. Initial tests revealed a 55% failure rate due to an underperforming database instance; after fixes, subsequent tests showed 0% failures. The next ticket release ran without downtime, server CPU stayed around 6%, cloud costs were reduced, and the tech team regained valuable time and peace of mind.

The Broad