When armed Israeli soldiers boarded a flotilla of boats trying to deliver food and medicine to Gaza on Wednesday night, two web developers in Glasgow scrambled to keep track of the vessels as millions of people worldwide tuned in to monitor their fate, Reuters reports.

As grainy footage from onboard cameras broadcast the raids live on the flotilla’s website, the developers updated the status of the vessels in real-time and posted short videos of each takeover.

The clicks were unprecedented, they said: the site registered 2.5 million visits on Wednesday and 3.5m on Thursday.

“I have never seen numbers like that not on a website I’ve ever made,” said Lizzie Malcolm, the co-director of Rectangle, a design and software development studio that helped track the vessels on behalf of the organisers.

“The idea was that a bigger thing was needed. There were discussions about how to communicate with people and an exchange of knowledge,” said Antonis Faras, from the Greek contingent of the March to Gaza movement.

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