What do you do when you’re sitting there, unable to do anything, as a crisis unfolds?

This happened to me today, on a mini-crisis level – for a website.

Harvard09.com went down after the press release for our Class Day Speaker (Matt Lauer). At 11 AM, the fateful e-mail was sent out. Purportedly, most students were in class, but in reality this meant everyone was online. Hundreds of simultaneous clicks, and the Harvard Computing Society server goes down.

Server Error! Network taking too long to respond!

What was I to do? Sit there and wait for half an hour as the drama unfolded. As the class webmaster, I had to take responsibility. Chats and IMs poured in.

Is the website down? Who’s the class day speaker? Tell me pleaseeeee!

Who’s to blame? I suppose everyone, in a way. HCS for having not enough server resources. Harvard Alumni Association for not providing us with money to pay for a third-party paid hosting service. And of course myself for not predicting that this would happen.

A bigger problem still remains: half of the people who I’ve talked to asked, “Who the heck is Matt Lauer?”