There is something almost painful about watching a company spend a fortune introducing itself to the country and then falling flat on its face in front of everyone.
That is what happened toAI.comon the night of 8 February 2026. A slick 30-second advert ran during the fourth quarter ofSuper BowlLX, inviting viewers to visit the site and claim a personal handle on a new AI agent platform. The ad looked good. The product sounded ambitious. And then the website collapsed under the weight of people who did what the ad told them to do.
Kris Marszalek, who runs AI.com and co-foundedCrypto.com, went onXshortly afterwards and said the platform had seen 'insane traffic levels'. His team had planned for a big evening. The evening was bigger.
Most people who tried to visit the site in those first few minutes received an error page. Some tried again later. Plenty did not bother.
The platform wants to be the place where ordinary people, not developers, not engineers, deploy AI agents that do things for them. Send messages. Organise calendars. Move information between apps without anyone having to click through screens.
That is a big promise. On the one night the company had the entire nation's attention, it delivered a website that wouldn't load. Difficult to sell the future of automation when your own infrastructure cannot handle a traffic spike you created yourself.
Marszalek paid roughly $70m in cryptocurrency for the AI.com domain. That figure, widely reported at the time, made it the largest publicly known domain sale ever. He wanted the name that would own the category. The kind of address people remember without being told twice.
A Super Bowl ad slot in 2026 ran around $8m for 30 seconds, according to industry estimates. AI.com has not confirmed what it paid. But between the domain and the ad buy, the company staked an enormous amount on one evening of exposure.
Source: International Business Times UK
