Update: As Twitterrati expected, Twitter is suffering from a bad case of World Cup overdose and “experienced several incidences of poor site performance and a high number of errors”.
With the World Cup kicking off today, there is growing speculation that Twitter will be enthusiastically used by people around the world to talk about the 32 teams playing the “beautiful game” on the global stage.
The growing interest in Twitter is also making some people wonder whether the dreaded Fail Whale might become a fixture during the World Cup as millions of fans enthusiastically tweet about the matches taking place. Most of these fans are located outside the U.S., a market that has seen flat growth in recent months.
Even Twitter expects that traffic will surge but spokeswoman Robin Sloan told CTV that Twitter isn’t expecting that traffic surges will be a problem.
“We’re checking and double-checking our capacity — although keep in mind that at this point, we’re already handling more than 65 million tweets per day, so while the World Cup is indeed going to be huge, we’re used to huge,” she said.
That comes across as a pretty brave front for a service that gawked earlier this week for no apparent reason. Many people were unable to use Twitter, which was suffering from over-capacity. Despite huge amounts of venture capital, Twitter continues to struggle to handle its growth.
Without a doubt, the World Cup will be a major test as Twitter plays a key role in how people following the action.
One Comment
Are you certain you mean: "a market that has seen flat growth in recent months."?