Twitter Overcapacity After Elections: Will Twitter Survive the World Cup?

 “Stupid whale,” came through one tweet after another this morning. Twitter, the social networking site which is being increasingly relied on by self storage operators as a marketing and communication tool, was overcapacity. Users who tried to access the site were treated to a “fail whale,” an image of Twitter’s symbolic whale, being carried by eight tiny orange birds, instead. The company disabled some of its features, such as Twitter Search, hovercards, photo uploads, web sidebar data, and RSS feeds this morning in order to allow some traffic onto the site. Some prognosticators argued that Twitter had been overloaded by post-election tweets. But if a few elections were enough to disable Twitter, will Twitter survive the upcoming World Cup?

Currently, more than 190 million Twitter members send an average of 65 million tweets every day. (Self storage users and operators alone send hundreds of tweets every week. You can receive tweets to these news stories, for example, by following StorageWriter on Twitter.) But the World Cup may send the daily or even hourly numbers of tweets into record numbers.

“The World Cup is probably the biggest organized human event on the planet, with more people paying attention to the same thing at the same time -- for a whole month!” worried Twitter spokeswoman Robin Sloan in an email interview posted by the Canadian Press this morning. “The last World Cup was in 2006, when Twitter was still a nascent service with thousands of users -- so this is really the first time Twitter and the World Cup have converged.” Twitter tends to be taken over by tweets about major events. During the U.S. Super Bowl, for example, more than half of tweets were Super Bowl related. Soccer tweets are already starting to take over the trending topics lists.

Today’s overcapacity message appears to have lasted for several hours, outraging Twitter users. By late morning, though, the problem was resolved, and Twitter announced that it had been caused by a problem with networking equipment. By then so many users had tweeted the “stupid whale” message that it had become a Twitter trend. 

Sources used:

Albanesius, Chloe. “‘Fail whale’ surfaces at Twitter again.” PC Magazine. June 9, 2010.

Canadian Press. “Twitter use expected to explode during World Cup.” CTV News. June 9, 2010.

Choney, Suzanne. “Twitter outage resolved.” MSNBC. June 9, 2010.

Habersham, Raisa. “Twitter now running after disabling features.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution. June 9, 2010.

“Site availability issues.” Twitter blog. June 9, 2010.