Surprise, surprise: Twitter has been savaged by the World Cup. In a blog post, Twitter concedes that it has:
“experienced several incidences of poor site performance and a high number of errors due to one of our internal sub-networks being over-capacity.”
In other words, there has been a spike in traffic that Twitter has been unable to handle.
First question: how did this happen? Twitter has had no lack of time to prepare for the World Cup, which features teams from 32 countries around the world. It’s not like Twitter didn’t know that traffic would spike. And it’s not like Twitter hasn’t already been scrambling to harden its infrastructure to handle major growth over the past year.
With all this advance warning, which has included a series of news coverage recently about Twitter’s ability to handle the World Cup, Twitter has failed, and we’re only two days into the World Cup. Can you imagine what will happen as the tournament moves along, and people really get excited about the biggest games over the next month?
So, who’s to blame? Is it Twitter for simply dropping the ball? (pun, completely intended!) Is it a case of the challenges inherent in trying to deal with massive spikes in traffic – something many companies are trying to help address?
Whatever the cause, this can’t be seen as anything but an embarrassment development for Twitter, which has failed miserably on the world stage.
2 Comments
I've noticed a huge number of people spamming World Cup hashtags like there's no tomorrow to get their Twitter username and/or product appearing on the World Cup live tweets page. There are so many people doing it, it makes the whole feature relatively useless. And, bizarrely, even the worst offenders haven't been banned yet.
This is true. Many World Cup hashtag tweets have absolutely nothing to do with their interest in the event, but are attempts to gain followers or promote websites. Unfortunately, I find this to be true in many of the more popular hash tags groupings