The T explains why the website crashed

from Mac Daniel in the Sunday Globe

According to the T, the site had more traffic to its schedules and maps than the contractor expected. There was also something the T called "a flaw in stress testing."
The Web guys who designed the site had it look up each schedule and map route every time someone requested it. But that was occurring so often that many of them never got through to the application server -- and never came back from the database server.
Stress tests were done, but they didn't reproduce the stress the schedules and map requests would cause on the server. And then the web site died.

whatever