Surge play
Viral launches and sudden spikes
Not every surge is on the calendar. A link lands, a creator posts, or a product goes sideways-famous. TideGuard is ready when the crowd arrives before capacity planning catches up.
Absorb the spike at the edge
When traffic multiplies in minutes, origin autoscaling and caches alone often lose the race. Putting a waiting room in front converts uncontrolled concurrency into a paced admit rate your app can finish.
Visitors wait in a fair FIFO line or lottery pool. Status and heartbeats keep the line honest. Signed admission tokens prove someone earned entry without forcing a new session store onto the origin.
Controls when the shape is messy
Viral events are uneven by geography and client quality. Temporary country block with a TTL, IP allowlist for staff, and Pass queue for smoke tests give operators levers without rewriting the product mid-spike.
Live queue metrics and the ~24h traffic chart help you decide whether to raise admit rate, pause silently, or hold the line while origin health recovers.
Deploy once, leave it ready
The useful posture for viral risk is a waiting room already deployed and branded, with protected paths configured, so opening the room is a control-room action rather than a greenfield project under load.
Clone the repo, run through /admin setup, estimate cost for a plausible spike, and keep TideGuard in front of the routes that must not melt when the internet arrives at once.
Next steps
Review the waiting room demos, check capabilities, or estimate Cloudflare cost for your crowd size. Other surge shapes: retail drops, and ticket onsales.