Theres really no point litigating this 4 years later (who cares) but it did happen. Uber had bots of some type, thousands of them in a single room. They were the largest user of our v1 API, which was an ancient shitty PHP base, and whatever they were doing put an enormous load on our backend during peak traffic periods and crippled the entire service.
Seeing this behavior was as easy as doing a join in mysql for user ids and rooms. I mean it's likely you wouldn't have seen it, or the room, or had knowledge of it unless you weren't directly involved with whatever it was?
It's actually quite relevant. I've worked in mega corporation, 50k employees and above. The inability of third party software to cope with the amount of users is a major recurring blocker for using off-the-shelf software and a big driver for developing things internally.
Most open-source and commercial software advertise that they can scale, but throw the first 500 or 5000 users and it's breaking apart.
Seeing this behavior was as easy as doing a join in mysql for user ids and rooms. I mean it's likely you wouldn't have seen it, or the room, or had knowledge of it unless you weren't directly involved with whatever it was?