Flight tracking website crashes following Queen’s final flight

FlightRadar24, a popular flight tracking service, crashed after six million people attempted the track the late Queen Elizabeth II’s flight from Scotland to London.

The website crashed moments after the RAF C-17 aircraft prepared to taxi the runway, with millions around the world trying to follow the jet’s progress. Followers began to notice that their screens, which usually give the trackers updates multiple times a second, had frozen.

In a tweet, FlightRadar24 confirmed: “In the moments before takeoff, nearly six million people attempted to follow the flight, causing disruption to our platform. We are working to ensure stability across our platform at the moment.”

Another tweet confirmed: “600k able to follow. Six million total attempts (which is what brought the site down).”

View playback of the flight carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt. https://t.co/39Vb8cCc76 pic.twitter.com/mU4GetUrWq
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 13, 2022

The Queen’s final flight was the most tracked flight in the world on FlightRadar24 once the website recovered, with over 350,000 tracking the plane as it delivered the recently deceased monarch to London.

Commenting later on the FR24 blog, Ian Petchenik wrote: “The Royal Air Force flight carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt near London set an all-time flight tracking record on Flightradar24 with 5 million people following along. 4.79 million people viewed the flight across Flightradar24 web and mobile app services and a further 296,000 followed the flight via YouTube live stream.

“Within the first minute of the aircraft’s transponder activating, 6 million people attempted to click on the flight carrying the Queen. That put unprecedented strain on the Flightradar24 platform, far beyond even what we experienced when the US Speaker of House flew to Taiwan and 2.2 million people followed the flight.”

Petchenik said that the team at FlightRadar24 implemented traffic calming measures to cope with high demand, but after 600,000 logged on the website’s performance degraded.

He said: “In total we processed 76.2 million requests related to this flight alone—that’s any action by a user, like clicking on the flight icon, clicking on the aircraft information in the left side box, or adjusting settings.

“Even though our platform suffered under such heavy load, Queen Elizabeth II’s final flight from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt, is by far the all-time most tracked flight on Flightradar24 and will likely remain at the top for a long while.”

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Flightradar24 queen elizabeth RAF C-17