The six million users who tried to go into the popular flight monitoring website FlightRadar24 as the late Queen was being escorted to London from Scotland caused the site to collapse.
Millions of people sought to follow the RAF C-17 cargo plane online as it prepared to taxi to the runway.
The website that records hundreds of planes daily throughout the world collapsed a short while afterwards.
The popular FlightRadar24 aircraft tracking website crashed as the late Queen’s body was flown out of Edinburgh Airport onboard an RAF Boeing C-17, pictured
The flight carrying the Queen’s remains from Edinburgh to London was the number 1 aircraft being tracked by the website FlightRadar24
The service confirmed almost six million people attempted to log onto the site to track the aircraft in the minutes before it departed Edinburgh
Followers soon noticed the screen, which normally updates the aircraft’s location multiple times a second, had frozen.
The service had a back-up feed on its YouTube page but users were soon able to log back onto the site.
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).’
Flight KRF01R was the most-tracked flight in the world on Flightradar24 once the website recovered, with over 350,000 watching the Boeing C-17A Globemaster III as it moved south through the UK, having left Edinburgh at 17:42 on Tuesday.
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.’
Mr Petchenik said in advance of the flight, the team had implemented ‘a number of traffic calming measures’ to cope with the anticipated demand.
However, after the first 600,000 people successfully logged on, performance on the website 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.’