"Unprecedented Prayer Activity": Popular Novena App Crashes from So Much Use

Is this a good or a bad thing? 😂

The popular novena app, Pray: The Catholic Novena App crashed today after so much use.

ChurchPOP reported this 2016 article that this handy app encourages Catholics to pray novenas. It notifies users of the novena day, automatically puts together each day’s prayer, and allows close friends to pray novenas together.

App creator Devin Rose explained that “we had downtime today on our Pray Catholic Novenas mobile app for multiple hours due to unprecedented prayer activity.”

The Catholic convert, blogger, and best-selling author added that “over the past several days, an enormous number of Catholics have flooded into the app and begun praying novenas (hooray!). That, of course, is a wonderful thing–the primary goal of our entire mission.”

However, Rose said “technology-wise, the database cluster we use on our backend got maxed out and then hit a cascading failure that we could not immediately recover from.”

The software developer said he immediately invoked the intercession of the 14 Holy Helpers, St. Rocco, Our Lady of Monte Berico, and St. Joseph because “we are battling a pandemic,” wondering if it might be a demonic attack.

He realized the system overloaded, and “we couldn’t just upgrade to the next level of database cluster. We needed to jump an entire tier upwards and go with a cluster that was five times as powerful.”

Rose said the app is up-and-running again, thanking users for “praying novenas right now.”

Click here to start praying with the Catholic Novena App!