This is the story of how a niche website held its own as giants crashed or were unavailable on the most important night of the year for hundreds of thousands of youngsters desperate to get their 2024 matric results.

The online matric results service of Maroela Media is published exclusively in Afrikaans, serving South Africa’s Afrikaans-speaking community and delivering matric results in their mother tongue. Traditionally, Maroela Media’s matric results page is visited by around 20,000 Afrikaans-speaking matric candidates.

Yet on matric results night this year, Maroela Media was the only functional South African matric results page. This was a fact that went viral, quickly making Maroela Media the go-to site, attracting visits by the entire class of 2024 who did not seem to care at all that their results were given in Afrikaans … as long as they were given!

Learners raced to find online translation tools, and many resorted to AI to translate results from Afrikaans into their mother tongues.

A total of 1,060,852 matrics sat the end-of-year exams last year. On the night of January 13 to 14, the Maroela Media Matriek Uitslae website had 1,979,557 page views, a more than 30-fold increase on the previous year’s traffic of 58,133 page views.

Although usually visited by a small fraction of that number, the site powered on, instantly letting candidates know their results and kick-starting celebrations for those who got the good news that they had passed.

“We are overjoyed to know that we were not only able to serve the Afrikaans community with matric results, but also the whole country,” says Susan Lombaard, CEO at Maroela Media.

“Community is what we are all about, and we are striving to make a positive difference in South Africa by delivering accurate, reliable news and content in Afrikaans to our two million monthly readers. To know that we could also serve the wider South African community with Flow Communications as our partner, by providing an accurate, reliable and stable matric results platform, was a really heart-warming way to kick off 2025.”

Flow Communications develops and hosts the matric results website of Maroela Media and has been doing so since 2018. Richard Frank, chief technical officer at Flow, says he and the Flow/Maroela team are delighted that they were able to help South Africa’s class of 2024 access results quickly and easily.

“It came down to the agility and responsiveness of the team. As word whipped around the country that this was the only functional results site, traffic to the site shot up, averaging about 33 requests per second and peaking at 70 requests per second. The team scaled servers throughout the night, making sure functionality was consistent and reliable,” he said. “Having the whole attention of the class of 2024 on one website was a major adrenaline rush.

“In the end, we were proud to serve South Africa and give young people the news they had been waiting weeks and weeks to hear.”