Case Study: The Washington Post achieves record‑breaking realtime election delivery with Pusher Channels

Breaking realtime records with The Washington Post’s election coverage

The Washington Post faced the challenge of delivering realtime, granular 2020 U.S. election results to a global, mobile-heavy audience without the latency, bandwidth and DOM performance problems of frequent AJAX polling. To meet strict speed and reliability requirements, The Washington Post partnered with Pusher and used Pusher Channels to build a WebSocket-based delivery engine for live updates across its election pages and homepage.

Pusher Channels (backed by Pusher’s Major Event Support) provided a single-connection, multi-channel WebSocket architecture, comprehensive client libraries and 24/7 engineering support. The implementation drove flawless realtime dashboards and homepage modules, peaking at over 1 million messages per second, more than 37 million new connections over six days and nearly 20 billion messages sent per day — enabling instant updates and giving The Washington Post confidence to expand realtime features sitewide.

The Washington Post

Jeremy Bowers

Director of Engineering