The Boxing Day tsunami was caused by an undersea earthquake on the 26th of December 2004 at 00:58:53 UTC; shortly after videos, photos started appearing online on personal websites from all around the world.

By the 28th of December all of the original websites which put the videos and photos online were taken offline - forced to remove the content due to being unable to handle the resulting traffic surge.

It was becoming clear that no single site would be able to remain online and provide the content that everyone was after so on the 29th of December 2004 at 02:49:48 UTC Wave of Destruction was born.

The difference between Wave of Destruction and other websites was that it was setup to handle the load and act as a central repository for tsunami related content, with volunteer’s mirroring the contents of the repository every hour via rsync.

No videos were served by this website; instead they were served by mirrors and via BitTorrent.

It was this design that made the site able to cope with the surge of traffic, here’s some stats from the heaviest days:

Wednesday December 29, 2004: 1,250,548 Pages
Thursday December 30, 2004: 2,507,008 Pages
Friday December 31, 2004: 3,107,008 Pages