News events led to dramatically increased traffic, causing the ACLU’s donation platform to go down under load, impacting revenue and supporter engagement at a critical time for the organization. Performance tuning under normal circumstances is difficult, but even more so while under extreme load and experiencing downtime with millions of dollars being lost by the hour. The ACLU called on Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership to perform emergency support and rescue work to get the ACLU Action website back online as quickly as possible and to help it withstand even bigger traffic spikes in the future. The results of Tag1’s efforts were 3,000% increase in donations from a yearly average of $4mm to $120mm, $24mm in donations on a single weekend, 57% faster database response times, 900% throughput increase in requests per minute. In addition, systems stay online and perform quickly under extreme loads.