Case Study: The Washington Post delivers realtime election results at scale with Pusher

The Washington Post breaks realtime election coverage records with Pusher: 37 million new connections in 6 days

The Washington Post needed to deliver live, real-time results for the 2020 US Presidential Election to a massive global audience. Their challenge was to push a vast volume of granular data updates instantly and reliably to millions of readers, particularly on mobile devices, without overloading networks or degrading performance with inefficient polling methods. They partnered with Pusher and used its Pusher Channels product to solve this.

Pusher provided a scalable WebSocket infrastructure that handled the immense load, allowing The Washington Post to push atomic updates directly to readers' browsers. The solution worked flawlessly, with Pusher supporting the event 24/7 and setting new records: over 1 million messages per second at peak and nearly 20 billion messages sent in a single day. This successful implementation proved the value of real-time delivery for the news organization, opening doors for future live coverage like sports and live blogs.

The Washington Post