system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What causes websites to crash after sudden, consistent high traffic and how are they fixed?

If a website encounters an influx of unexpected traffic for multiple weeks causing it to crash, how do they fix this and how long would it normally take? Also, how could it still not function during lower traffic times?
gpt
Websites are hosted by something called a Web server and the people connecting to it are called web clients.

Imagine a drive through restaruant, let's call it McRolands, serves people that arrive in cars one by one. Each car places its order (requests a web page), McRoland cooks the webpage and gives it to the client. It can handle the normal amount of traffic coming to it fine.

Now imagine all of a sudden a bunch of coaches turn up with 80 people on board. It's got to serve all them tasty web pages to the people on the coaches while the usual amount of traffic is still coming to the restaurant. There's a big hold up, people can't get their BigWebs and WebShakes. 

McRoland has a big back order of requests that it needs to serve and people aren't getting their stuff. Annoyed, some of the people drive off because they can't get their stuff. Meanwhile McRoland might still be trying to process those requests so it's still trying to serve up a Royale with Java, walking round the car park trying to find some one who's already left.

Sometimes the server will eventually catch up as the timeouts expire on the requests and they start throwing uncollected orders in the bin. Sometimes it may just crash the whole system and requires the Area Manager to step in and turn the restaurant off and on again.