14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been having a lot of trouble staying up during the World Cup and things are not about to get any better. The Fail Whale has been a regular occurrence and the site has been down hours at a time. In order to cope with the increased traffic and strain it puts on the infrastructure, Twitter has now slashed the API rates for developers in half. If this was any other site, the change wouldn’t have meant that much, but, since 75 percent of Twitter’s traffic comes from apps using the API, it affects a lot of people.
“There are many techniques we've used and improvements we will continue to make to deal with our capacity issues. Reducing the API rate-limit is not the first or only method we use and is one we try to avoid if possible. However, it is also one of the more effective ways to reduce load and ensure that the Twitter service remains available to the greatest number of users,” Twitter’s Matt Harris announced in the Twitter Development Tool Google Group.
For now, the default API rate limit will go down from 350 to 175 requests per hour, a move which will reduce the load on the infrastructure considerably. It should mean that Twitter will be able to handle more people each day, even at the busiest moments. Considering that the most exiting matches of the World Cup are yet to come, you can be sure that the site will break, yet again, its own usage record.
To be clear, the cut in API requests per hour will only affect the number of times an application can ping Twitter for updates such as new tweets or conduct new searches. Users will still be able to tweet as much as they like. In practice, there shouldn’t be much difference, even if the rates have halved, tweets will just come a few tens of seconds later.