Dear Senfcallers,
At the beginning of last week, the number of concurrent users on Senfcall increased massively. On Tuesday, we counted close to 6000 simultaneous video conference participants. Before the start of the new year, this would probably have brought Senfcall to a standstill. But the Senfcall team has been working hard for the past week to make Senfcall available to as many people as possible and in its usual spicy quality.
As a result, we only had to disable the creation of new conference rooms for a total of 30 minutes so that ongoing sessions were not interrupted. A single one of our servers, whose number had to be temporarily increased to 25, suffered a technical defect, so the meetings affected by this had to be restarted. We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.
In the meantime, we have added new capacity and made some improvements to our system, so we are able to handle this week in a more relaxed manner. The last week has cost us, besides a lot of time and sleep, also more money than we had expected last year. We still have enough reserves to continue running Senfcall until summer with this number of users. However, we have decided to make our donation page more accessible again and have also reopened our Betterplace campaign. Still, we are not currently suffering from a shortage of funds.
A welcome side effect of the rush was some media coverage. For example, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported on the sudden increase in use (article in German) and we were interviewed via Senfcallcall on rheinmaintv (video in German).
We thank you for trusting our service and the exciting experiences. Your Senfcall Team