Urban Airship Sets Message Delivery Speed Records During the 2018 FIFA World Cup

PORTLAND, Ore., — August 22, 2018 — Customer engagement company Urban Airship today revealed that its platform’s peak messaging throughput has increased 33 percent, setting a new internal record of 400,000 notifications per second during the conclusion of the World Cup Final as traffic spiked for nearly seven minutes. These improvements, a result of migrating its real-time messaging infrastructure from co-located bare-metal to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), are set for substantial gains with the general availability of Boost — a new Urban Airship service that dramatically accelerates the delivery of push notifications, even at massive global scale. The benefits of Boost were immediately realized during the World Cup by design partner and customer Onefootball, the world’s largest and fastest-growing platform for football fans with more than 35 million global season active users.

“Onefootball’s audience has increased dramatically over the last two World Cups and 85 percent of users opt in to receive notifications, so a scalable real-time messaging platform is a core requirement,” said Lucas von Cranach, CEO and founder, Onefootball. “We’ve had a very good collaboration with Urban Airship for the past two years, and now Boost has improved the reliability and speed of our notifications. Speed is critical as there’s no customer more passionate than a sports fan. Messages arriving seconds sooner make all the difference to their experience and the value of our platform.”

Urban Airship Boost includes a software optimization service running on top of Google Cloud, which includes multi-dimensional message speed reporting and direct access to the Urban Airship engineering team for performance consulting. Now any business can ensure that its message delivery infrastructure ranks among the world’s best.

Lucas continues, “During the World Cup and other highly engaging events, we experience spikes that exceed the regular traffic volume by multiple times. Notifications are one of our key drivers for app openings. We used Urban Airship’s in-app automation engine to instantly reach app users in precise in-session moments to drive greater engagement.”

Notification volume when France won the World Cup Championship over Croatia. Green represents Android push notifications, blue represents iOS push notifications and purple represents web notifications.  

Urban Airship has long been the industry standard when seconds matter for breaking news and real-time alerts. The company already serves hundreds of the largest media companies, such as NBCUniversal, News UK, Times Internet and USA TODAY. According to Forrester Research, “… Urban Airship sends more push notifications per month than about 10 of the smaller vendors combined” (Forrester Research Inc., “How To Choose A Mobile Messaging Vendor,” April 10, 2017).

“Since the London Olympics, Urban Airship has delivered major world news on a hybrid architecture combining cloud platforms and bare-metal infrastructure,” said Mike Herrick, SVP of Product & Engineering, Urban Airship. “Now, with Google Cloud Platform, we’ve been able to increase platform reliability, cut production incidents in half, and deliver unprecedented performance at incredible global scale — all while dedicating resources to industry-leading innovations like the Boost service we are unveiling today. Our data shows 98 percent of Onefootball users received notifications in under 30 seconds.”