MLB.com Suffers Outages As Result Of Domino's No-Hitter Promotional Effort

Yesterday’s redemption of the MLB.com "DomiNoNo" promotion suffered under heavy online traffic, resulting in widespread site outages that also briefly trended on Twitter. Domino’s pizza chain offered 20,000 free pizzas to MLB.com registered users following each of the first two no-hitters of the season, a promotion that went into effect after Dodgers P Josh Beckett no-hit the Phillies on Sunday. The marketing effort is now in its second year after an incident-free run in ’13, and was renewed last month for the ’14 and ’15 seasons. But even with a doubling this year of the free pizzas to 20,000, the redemption codes at mlb.com/dominos were claimed yesterday afternoon in 45 minutes, roughly half the time used to distribute the codes following each of two no-hitters last year. Domino's spokesperson Chris Brandon in an e-mail wrote, “We’re sorry the site wasn’t able to handle the sudden surge in participation. We’re thrilled that so many people want to participate in the DomiNoNo event.”