Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

Chapter 149 Debugging and Launch

Wang Xing stood at the door of his dormitory, looking at the chaotic scene of people lying in disarray in the corridor, and then looked back at the sack full of chicken legs in the corner, feeling a wave of fear wash over him.

Fortunately, Wang Huiwen collapsed after finishing his lunch. He had only eaten half of it when he noticed the blood, so he threw it away to stop the damage.

"Brother, take a look at the group chat." Wang Huiwen's voice came from the inner room, weak and listless. "It's not just our building, the Renmin University dormitory has also been blown up."

Wang Xing returned to his computer and opened the QQ group.

The messages are scrolling by so fast, I can't keep up at all.

"Brothers, the water rooms on all three floors of Building 8 at Beihang University are full. Someone even threw up in the hallway."

"There are six of us in our dorm who ate four of them. Now three of us are waiting in line at the school hospital, and one of us is stuck in the toilet."

"The situation was even worse for the students from the Geology Department. The chicken legs they received were reportedly delivered around 3 PM and left to dry in the sun for two hours. One guy said that when he bit into one, the inside was pink."

"Did Sohu get their chicken drumsticks from a morgue?"

Wang Xing scrolled down and found that he had a QQ group with friends from several nearby universities. The group was filled with wailing and cursing, interspersed with a large number of real photos of long queues at the university hospitals.

One photo shows the corridor of the emergency department at Renmin University Hospital, where plastic chairs are filled with college students clutching their stomachs, and several basins are scattered on the floor, with some people vomiting.

Wang Huiwen, supporting herself against the wall, moved to the computer, glanced at the screen, and weakly cursed, "Chen Yizhou is using all the college students in Beijing as guinea pigs."

"They're not guinea pigs." Wang Xing closed the QQ group and opened the forum on HaiNei.com. The homepage was flooded with posts about fried chicken legs. "They're韭菜 (a metaphor for exploited people). Look at what they wrote, first they harvest one crop with red envelopes, then they poison another with chicken legs. Sohu's social empire is built on a septic tank."

Another series of hurried footsteps and screams echoed through the stairwell, like a symphony of ebb and flow, reverberating from the first floor all the way to the sixth floor, never ceasing.

Wang Huiwen clutched her stomach as her attack began again, then turned and staggered towards the bathroom.

Wang Xing glanced at the remaining chicken legs in the sack, thought for a moment, picked it up with great effort, carried it downstairs, and threw the whole sack into the large trash can downstairs.

The dull thud of the sack hitting the ground was drowned out by the sounds of water being flushed throughout the dormitory building.

At 11 p.m., Zhang Chaoyang's personal cell phone rang for the thirty-seventh time.

He didn't want to answer, but the number displayed was the landline of the director of Sohu's public relations department, so he could only grit his teeth and press the answer button.

"Mr. Zhang, reporters from the Beijing Evening News are blocking the entrance to the building, wanting to cover the food safety incident. The deputy director of the Renmin University Academic Affairs Office has also called three times, saying that more than 20 students have been admitted to the school hospital, 12 of whom are still receiving intravenous fluids. They suspect that the students got acute gastroenteritis from eating fried chicken legs, and they are demanding an explanation from Sohu."

Zhang Chaoyang rubbed his temples, his throat feeling like it had been rubbed with sandpaper: "Keep it to yourself for now, I'll respond personally tomorrow morning."

The call had barely ended when another one came in; this time it was from the Student Affairs Office of Beihang University.

"Is this Mr. Zhang from Sohu? Ten of our students are showing symptoms resembling food poisoning. The school has already reported it to the health and epidemic prevention department. Please send someone from your company to handle this as soon as possible."

Zhang Chaoyang pursed his lips and gritted his teeth, his hand holding the phone trembling slightly.

He slammed his phone down on his desk, screen facing down, the vibration of the new call muffled and buzzing on the surface.

The roadshow team departs tomorrow.

Nasdaq underwriters are waiting for him to tell an exciting story of internet user growth.

But now, his social media section has first produced the "Buddha Light Dog" incident, and then the "poisonous chicken leg" incident, making college students across the internet want to use Sohu's logo as a target to stab.

His phone rang again, but he didn't answer.

Looking at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror in the office restroom, Zhang Chaoyang suddenly remembered something Liu Xin had said on the phone a month ago—"If you can't handle Chen Yizhou, we'll have to consider whether we should keep this business."

He can barely hold a plate anymore.

Meanwhile, on the sixteenth floor of Hailong Building.

Qihang Technology's office area was brightly lit, and everyone was glued to their workstations.

Zhang Jian's ten fingers hovered above the keyboard as he stared at the last set of joint debugging data on the screen.

With remote assistance, the mobile company's data department technicians have confirmed that the billing gateway's buffer pool is functioning normally and that all test cases have passed.

"Mr. Bai, China Mobile has confirmed it. The signaling channels across the entire network have been synchronized." Zhang Jian turned and shouted to Bai Yuhang, who was standing behind him.

Wang Xiaochuan sat beside him, his eyes fixed on the scrolling logs. He pushed up his black-rimmed glasses and said, "The message queue has passed the peak stress test. The fault tolerance rate is within 0.3 per thousand, which is an order of magnitude better than expected."

Bai Yuhang glanced at the time; it was 11:42 PM.

"Let's go."

Zhang Jian pressed the Enter key heavily.

The command line on the screen scrolled rapidly for a few seconds, and the last line of green characters popped up—"Mobile Dream Network Recharge Channel: ALLCHANNELSONLINE".

Zhang Jian jumped up from his chair and yelled at the entire office area, "It's connected! The whole network is connected!"

A brief cheer erupted from the technical department, but no one left their workstations. Everyone kept their eyes fixed on the monitoring modules they were responsible for, waiting for the real flood to come in.

Wan Lianghao updated the recharge channel entry prompt on the front-end management page—"Recharge by sending a text message, phone credit is deducted directly, instant arrival," and the red eye-catching logo was displayed in the most conspicuous position on the HaiNei.com homepage.

For the first ten minutes, nothing happened.

Jiang Shuo stood at the door of the finance office, his fingers unconsciously pushing up his glasses frame, his eyes fixed on the back-end transaction panel, the numbers occasionally jumping up and down, a few yuan, a dozen yuan, scattered here and there.

"Haven't the users noticed yet?" Jiang Shuo muttered.

In the twelfth minute, the numbers started to increase rapidly.

One hundred, three hundred, eight hundred, one thousand five.

"It's here." Zhang Jian stared at the server load curve, his voice low, as if afraid of startling something.

In the twentieth minute, the numbers on the progress bar stopped jumping up in rows; they started rolling continuously, like the reel of a slot machine, making it impossible to see how many had passed in between.

Jiang Shuo leaned closer to the screen, his lips trembling.

"President Bai—" His voice snapped, "Twenty minutes, forty-six thousand."

, 7

The thirtieth minute.

Wan Lianghao stood up from his workstation, holding onto the partition, and exclaimed in a thick Northeastern accent, "My god! My newly designed outfit, which hadn't sold much in the three days since it went on sale, has sold over four thousand sets in just half an hour!"

Jiang Shuo's gaze was already vacant. He took out the calculator, pressed the keys twice, and then pressed them again.

"In thirty minutes, the SMS channel's transaction volume exceeded 130,000." Jiang Shuo turned to look at Bai Yuhang, his expression somewhere between ecstasy and shortness of breath. "President Bai, what used to take an hour for the voice messaging service is now done in half an hour. And this is late at night; most users are asleep."

Bai Yuhang leaned against the door frame, holding a purple clay teacup, and took a sip of tea.

"Don't get excited, keep an eye on the server."

Zhang Jian responded loudly from the technical area: "Don't worry, Mr. Bai, the servers are rock solid! The mobile gateway has a message queue to back it up, and the load is less than 30%. I think we can handle even ten times the load tonight."

Wang Xiaochuan pushed up his glasses, looking at the smooth data flow logs on the screen, and couldn't help but smile.

The code he had seen and worked with at Sohu was nothing compared to this system; it was like comparing a bicycle to an airplane.