The graph went crazy. User count: 44k. Latency: 200ms. Then 150. Then 90. The stream was actually improving .
But the firewall adjusted. Within ninety seconds, the Zoom trick was dead. Rohan wiped sweat from his brow. He had one last move—a nuclear option he'd coded at 3 AM six months ago, never tested in production.
He opened the XCMS admin panel. It was a beautiful thing—a dark dashboard with neon-orange graphs showing real-time connections. Forty-three thousand active users. A little red dot blinked in the corner: Bandwidth: 94% .