Dolly Parton's New Ice Cream Was So Popular It Crashed The Jeni's Website
Dolly Parton has a new ice cream and we ALL need it. Sharing on her Instagram just 2 weeks ago, Parton revealed that April 8th was go-day for fans (both of Dolly and ice cream): "I've teamed up with @JenisIceCreams to create my very own flavor in support of @imaginationlibrary! Strawberry Pretzel Pie is available at Jeni's April 8 [strawberry emoji]." It's been reported that the ice cream includes salty pretzel streusel, strawberries, and a sweet and tangy cream cheese ice cream. This special flavor was limited to only 10,000 pints sold both online and in Jeni's brick and mortar stores (via Eater). Not only do these pints sound delicious, but the proceeds all helped support Parton's Imagination Library, a charity that works to provide free books to young children and encourage early literacy (via Imagination Library).
Seriously, we need no convincing that this ice cream is worthy of any cheat day, but with a limited run as well as a limited purchase amount (2 pints per customer), how could you get ahold of it? In short, you couldn't. Demand was so high for this sweet treat it crashed Jeni's Ice Cream website.
Those strawberry pretzel pie cravings may have to wait
Jeni's Ice Cream broke the news on April 8th, asking, "Did y'all just break our website?" (via Twitter). Angry fans replied with stories of the glitching website. One Twitter user lamented, "This is kind of a mess. Your /dolly site keeps redirecting to asking us to login again (despite checking we're logged in), and the email you just sent – the link redirects to a 404 page... seems no one has been able to actually order???" Screenshot after screenshot was uploaded, and users were commenting that Jeni's hadn't fixed the site within the first hour or so.
The ice cream vendor replied in a thread later in the afternoon explaining what had happened: "Our site had 50 times more users than it sees on average. We had planned and tested for this level of traffic and expected our site to be able to handle it. (4/6)" (via Twitter). They further explained that the fix took longer than expected, "When the site went down, we had confidence it would be back up quickly. We never imagined it would take as long as it did."
While fans were understandably disappointed, Jeni's promised to do their best to rectify the situation, stating that they would provide 48 hours' notice on social media before the ice cream flavor is offered again. We can hope that this time, they'll be prepared with both pints and gigabytes of data, too.