When you walk around the offices of Twitter’s engineering department, located on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters, you will see signs counting down the days until the World Cup. The World Cup is the world’s biggest sporting event, and because it consists of fewer matches than the Olympics, it generates more Internet traffic, in shorter bursts . More than 3.2 billion people watched at least a minute of the World Cup live in 2010. For Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, YouTube, and a host of regional social media sites from Brazil to Russia, the World Cup means engineers frantically working overtime to prevent outages and site overloads.

Our true scaling story started at the last World Cup

Twitter learned this the hard way in 2010. Facing an unprecedented surge of user traffic, in amounts of more than 150,000 tweets per hour, Twitter crashed repeatedly during the 2010 World Cup. Users constantly encountered the “Fail Whale” (to be fair, Twitter has crashed a lot less so far in 2014) and Twitter’s engineers copped to “periodic high rates of errors.” In a now-deleted post on Twitter’s engineering blog, the popular social networking service said the huge traffic influx from the 2010 World Cup created unspecified network issues.

When World Cup matches take place, entire countries take to the Internet. They tweet, update their Facebook statuses, and watch instant replays at a massive clip. This has meant all sorts of new partnerships designed to capture fans and their wallets. CNN and Facebook are teaming up to use Facebook’s analytics teams to provide real-time information on global sentiment about upcoming matches. ESPN is getting ready for an unprecedented logistics and engineering challenge by livestreaming all World Cup matches to mobile and desktop. Brazil’s mobile carriers and Internet service providers are working frantically to prevent outages. In short: If you work at a digital service that people use during the World Cup, the last few months have meant lots of overtime.

But back at Twitter’s headquarters, the company’s goal is to prevent another replay of the 2010 World Cup tech troubles. They’re a publicly traded corporation now, and one that wants to take on Facebook and even SMS text messages as the way the world communicates. Although Twitter would only speak with Fast Company in general terms about how they keep their network resilient for big events like the Olympics or presidential elections, it’s clear they take the 2014 World Cup very seriously.

Raffi Krikorian is one of Twitter’s main engineers who keeps the service’s backend working. Krikorian, a vice president of platform engineering, helms a team (which encompasses approximately one third of Twitter’s software engineers) responsible for preventing outages and making sure the service is available.

I still have PTSD from the last World Cup at Twitter

“I’ve been here just shy of five years, and I still have PTSD from the last World Cup at Twitter,” Krikorian told me. “When you come to my floor at Twitter headquarters, we have signs all over the floor with a countdown to the World Cup. Reliability is at the top of our minds, and reliability first is the mantra. Somewhere in the world, there is a sporting event, an election, or an earthquake.”

But it also poses very specific engineering challenges for Twitter. Krikorian’s team plans for the World Cup using worst-case scenarios of extremely high site traffic. One hypothetical he brought up on the phone was a Brazil-Japan match; Twitter’s market penetration in Japan is massive and a Japanese television show holds the record for inspiring the most tweets-per-second.