DataDome has the know-how to filter out malicious bots.

The pandemic became a technology challenge for SNCF, with traffic peaks and unprecedented purchasing behavior.

With over a billion tickets sold since its inception, an average of 40 million visits per month in 2020, and 80% of its traffic coming from mobile phones, oui.sncf is a global heavyweight in the world of online sales.

The pandemic forced the SNCF to adapt to severe technological constraints, starting with e-voyageur SNCF, the subsidiary founded in 2018, which includes the oui.sncf, Assistant SNCF, and Rail Europe websites and apps.

Each time official announcements were made by the Minister of Health, the Prime Minister, or the President, traffic on the oui.sncf website went through the roof. “Those speeches led to unbelievable surges in traffic for us,” explains Benoît Bouffart, Chief Technology and Product Officer for e-Voyageurs (which manages services including the Oui.sncf website). “We’re used to this sort of thing happening four times per year, when tickets go on sale for the busiest travel days. We manage the calendar and the destination info to handle that extra activity. But this … This took us out of our routine.“

SNCF: 133,000 tickets sold in a few hours

All of a sudden, traffic flow became much more complicated, with only 24–48 hours’ notice of major announcements. Ticket purchases increased, as did cancellations, exchanges, and refunds, which all benefited from fewer restrictions than usual.

“On March 31, when the President announced a new lockdown at 8:06 or 8:07 p.m., we got 3,000 queries per second on oui.sncf,” says Romain Ceyrat, Director of Technology for e-voyageurs. “That’s a colossal figure, nine or ten times what we’d normally see in the evening hours.” On March 31, 2021, the site sold 133,000 tickets in a matter of hours. But it also handled five times more cancellations than it normally would, as travel dates were changed.

“Chaos engineering”

“What our customers don’t realize is that we’re a tech leader. We have implemented many groundbreaking innovations,” notes Benoît Bouffart. “In order to meet technological challenges, e-voyageur SNCF has been planning for such extraordinary periods of activity for a long time. We do this through regular implementation of changes that are evaluated over time, as well as periodic, targeted crash testing to see what happens if the app is buggy.”

On a regular basis, the teams turn to ‘chaos engineering’ and push the system to its absolute limit: 6,000 queries per second.

“We turn to outside companies, such as DataDome, which recently raised [35$] million euros*. They have the know-how to filter out malicious bots that take advantage of peak reservation periods to find their way into the system. We want to focus our energy on real customers, not impostors, but bots can make up half our traffic. We’ve also brought in Contentsquare, which just raised 500 million euros. They analyze customer behavior and customer journeys in order to optimize them. We are also working with Instana, a monitoring specialist.”

“A TGV every second”

Fifty team members were mobilized for each evening of the booking surge. In the future, the group will increase its cloud storage capacity (AWS) and buy new servers.

“The experience we’ve developed in recent months will help us in the future. We had learned from the 2019 corporate reform strikes. There were a lot of inquiries at the time on the travel assistant, asking about schedules, which trains were running or cancelled. The next challenge will be the Christmas season, because we expect French people to be traveling more. We generally sell enough tickets to fill a TGV [high-speed] train every second. We’re also expecting big changes this autumn. With so many people working from home and going back to the office in September, there will be high demand for travel info. We’re getting ready for that,” says Benoît Bouffart.

*DataDome recently raised $35M USD – Venture Beat