14 DAY TRIAL // As the news sites failed following the news of Michael Jackson's death, so did the place where most of the activity was bound to happen, Twitter. The site experienced a huge spike in traffic and a doubling of the number of tweets, which slowed it considerably. The problems were so great, that Twitter had to disable some features like search, arguably the site's most resource-hungry one.
“We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone said to the LA Times. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”
The number of tweets went up to 5,000 per minute at its peak and, with all of the people searching for information about the news, Twitter, which has been known for spotty performance in the past, showed decreased response and sometimes lack of availability, the dreaded fail whale. “Regarding performance,” Stone added, “there were reports of slowness following the spike in activity. It highlighted an opportunity for improvement which we'll be acting on right away.”
Michael Jackson's death quickly monopolized the discussions on the micro-blogging platform as, at one point, nine out of the ten trending topics were related to the news. At the same time, Twitter search wasn't exactly real-time anymore, as it, apparently, lagged 20 minutes behind. This prompted the site's operators to disable the search and trending topic features altogether.
“We’ve had to temporarily disable search results from the logged-in homepage of twitter.com (this includes the saved searches and trends shown in the sidebar). We’re working on the underlying problem and will bring back these features as soon as we can,” a post on the Twitter status blog read.
Another piece of information that should speak highly of how technology has evolved to a point where almost anyone can use it but not so highly about the ones actually using it is the sheer number of misspelled names getting in to the trending topics like “Micheal,” “P Micheal,” “P Michael Jackson,” “Micheal Jackson,” and, of course, “RIP Micheal Jackson.” Fortunately, as the night set in the US, the search and trending topic functions are up again on Twitter, unfortunately, in the morning, so will all the people spelling “Micheal.”