It's pretty common for sites to crash, especially those relying on some AI or GPU backed service.

One year ago or so one of my posts ended up within the first few items of the home page and my blog got about 35K views over 2 days. The blog is hosted on a commercial platform and had no server issues.

30k unique visitors when my project hit the front page (not #1) a few weeks ago

10 years ago a post from @Bluehat for something we were working on* made #1 and generated about 7k clicks in 2 days.

Would suspect that number is much, much higher now.

* The Hacker Fair reverse job fair at the Hacker Dojo. #2 was "the CIA got hacked". Proud of that one.

Front page post got about 22k unique users over 2 days and never crashed (had CDN by the way).