​Town News ability to handle major traffic surge

I feel for the web staff at The Dallas Morning News. During the shootings last night their primary site just couldn’t take the load. (Their beta site remained online for those who knew about it and had the URL.)

It got me wondering, if one of our sites were exposed to the huge traffic surge from a major national event such as this, would it be able to handle the load?

I’m hoping y’all can share what sort of technology and procedures you have in place for a major spike in traffic. Can things scale automatically or does it require some manual intervention by Town News staff? To what level and how quickly can additional resources be thrown at a problem like this if needed?

Looking forward to any insight that can be shared.