The opportunity
Swipe was brought on to support a broader digital transformation project: building a centralised content management system for M-Net’s multiple interactive platforms. As part of this partnership, we were tasked with replacing M-Net’s legacy voting systems with a world-class alternative – one that could handle high traffic, withstand public scrutiny and deliver results in real time.
What used to take three days now had to happen in three hours.
The solution
We built a secure, cloud-native voting platform from scratch, hosted on AWS and designed to scale rapidly. Built with a Multi-AZ architecture and backed by robust monitoring systems like CloudWatch and New Relic, our infrastructure delivered 100% uptime, even during peak voting surges.
The platform includes:
- A customised voting widget that can be embedded on any web page
- Horizontal and vertical auto-scaling to meet demand instantly
- Real-time performance monitoring, alerts and dashboards
- Rigorous end-to-end testing and lockdown protocols before every event
We also developed clear processes for auditing, error handling and incident response – crucial in a high-pressure, high-visibility environment where every vote counts.
The results
In the 14th season of Idols SA alone, the system processed more than 142 million votes – 32.5 million in the final week. At its peak, it handled over 33 000 votes per second with 100% uptime and verified results.
And it hasn’t stopped there: over time, the Swipe x Don’t Look Down system has processed 475+ million votes from 1.5 million+ unique users, making it one of the most resilient, scalable, real-time voting platforms on the continent.
Key takeaways:
- Built for scale and speed – up to 33 738 votes/second
- Proven under pressure with 100% uptime
- Embedded, multi-platform voting widget
- Deep partnership with producers and auditors
- Engineered for real-time decision-making
