First, you have to remember that there’s no do-over with these kind of events. Everything simply has to work when the games go off-delays or postponements are unthinkable. So what goes into creating a website capable of supporting the Olympics?
Perhaps most surprising, there’s no massive server farm. The actual processing taking place on the website is relatively small. However, there is massive use of the Akamai CDN to distribute content around the world. The Olympics website has been using live video to transmit the progress of the Olympic torch and has contracted with Akamai to distribute it.