“The abrupt boost in popularity caused Chess.com, the most popular chess app, to crumble, forcing the company to upgrade its servers significantly.”
Chess.com went from under 2 million active players before the pandemic to about 12 million a day, and its servers buckled. The fuel was TikTok clips, a cheating scandal turned meme, and the fact that chess sites get past school firewalls. The kids are not good at it, which is fine. Chess.com gets the traffic either way.