The servers were knocked out at a Stoke Newington architecture and design website after it played a part in the biggest product launch of the year of the iPhone 5.

Dezeen featured in technology company Apple’s keynote presentation in San Francisco and also its promo film for the new phone, which consumers around the planet queued up overnight to buy.

“This is fantastic for Dezeen because of the enormous exposure and kudos it brings,” said its director Marcus Fairs.

“Millions of people watched the keynote live and millions more will have watched the iPhone 5 movie online. You can’t buy this kind of publicity.”

Apple’s marketing team approached Dezeen, based in Church Street, in April saying they loved the site and asked if they would collaborate with them.

They were asked to create a “cleaned-up” version of their home page without ads or social network buttons.

“They didn’t say precisely how it would be used and they also said that it might not be used at all,” said Marcus.

“When the iPhone 5 launch happened and Dezeen was featured it was a total surprise and we only found out through friends alerting us via Twitter, email and text messages.

“When MacRumours featured us the traffic to Dezeen was so strong our servers were temporarily knocked out,” he said.

The sequence featuring Dezeen shows an iPhone 5 user getting an email from a friend telling him about a “great website” and including a link to Dezeen, which the user clicks.

“The sequence is used to express the iPhone 5’s ability to load rich web pages really quickly and the fact they chose Dezeen for this, rather than any other website in the world, suggests that the team at Apple are huge fans of our site,” said Marcus.

“That’s the biggest compliment we can be paid.”