The good news is that the United States Mint site, by all accounts, did not go down during the onslaught of traffic with the latest Morgan Dollar releases. The bad news is that the United States Mint site got a bit shaky at the height of the traffic storm. But it survived, relatively unscathed, and that is a far cry better than the site’s performance just three months ago.
As readers know, the Mint released the 2021-D and 2021-S Morgan Dollars yesterday at Noon Eastern. The demand for these coins honoring the 100th anniversary of the transition from the Morgan Dollar to the Peace Dollar has been exceptionally high. The Mint actually delayed these releases as it did bolstering work of its site over the early part of this summer. Yesterday was the truest test yet of if that work had paid off, even more so than the 2021-W American Eagle Type-2 Silver Proof from last week.
By monitoring Twitter, Reddit, and other channels, it does not appear that anyone dealt with a true crash of the Mint’s site or significant delays due to the anti-BOT technology it has deployed. Some users did complain of the site being slower than normal but not unavailable. By far the biggest complaint was around the checkout process where users were having to wait several minutes in some cases to see if their orders had gone through. That caused more than a few anxious moments for buyers.
Does this mean that the Mint has finally made the improvements to its site to withstand heavy traffic on high demand products? It would seem to be the case. There does appear to be room for improvement around the shopping cart experience and perhaps that needs to be investigated by the Mint. But given the fact that both the 2021-D and 2021-S Morgans sold out within minutes and there was not “rage Tweeting” going on in the process, take it as a win.
Well done United States Mint.