Hikaru’s friends on chess.com are too many.
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So funny
Yeah, he said on his stream, August 15th, "Apparently, because I have so many friends, I am legitimately slowing down the entire site". Then he laughs.
Later in the day, on Twitch, he made a more correct statement, "A number of my chess.com friends were removed because of what they called 'technical issues' with the friend system, but they're working on the problem, and they will all eventually be restored."
Think of it this way, in 2023, Chess.com reported an average of 37.67 million games per day. While the exact number for 2025 isn't available, it's likely to be similar or higher, given the platform's continued popularity. Each one of those games requires attention by the server, data "packets" travelling back and forth in fractions of a second. But merely being on a friends list is not in any way an activity, excluding the initial request and the response... even if 100 thousand came about in one hour, the impact on the server would be negligible.
The problem is with the data center and the software. Such a massive friends list was not anticipated.
There hasn't been a change in policy and no other friends list seems to have been affected.
Hikaru has 90,000 and chess.com said to him that it is slowing down the server. Hahaaahhaahhah 🤣