Microsoft's Photosynth Crashes on Day 1

Microsoft Wednesday launched PhotoSynth, an application that would allow users to generate 3D environments from a stitched together series of photographs. However, unprecedented demand for the program has seen the Photosynth website collapse under heavy traffic.

Just hours after launch, people began to have trouble accessing the website. A post in the Microsoft Live Lab blog was quick to lay everything out straight and explain to the masses what was going on with PhotoSynth.

Microsoft explained that while the PhotoSynth team had done massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model to try and cope with demands once the application launched, but traffic had proved too much and they were currently adding more horsepower to be back up soon. The blog also said that the overwhelming amounts of traffic meant the company had to switch PhotoSynth to a special static/read-only mode for the time being.

The initial blog was followed with regular updates detailing the progress being made in getting the site back up and running. A report appeared at 3:40 p.m. that PhotoSynth was back online but that new synths had yet to be switched back on.

Aside from some fairly normal first day jitters, Microsoft announced that overall, day one had gone pretty well. Despite the down time, 7727 synths have been created comprised of over 286,689 images.

Visit Photosynth to try out the application for yourself.