14 DAY TRIAL // The World Cup promises to be a record breaker when it comes to Internet audience, it’s already showing signs of that, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. While many people will be turning to Twitter to share the excitement or get hold of the action during the World Cup, the microblogging service may not be able to cope. Twitter has experienced several issues including outages yesterday, just like the company warned earlier last week.
A couple of posts on Twitter’s Status blog explain the issues. “We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to scheduled network maintenance. We’re currently working to address the issues. We’ll update with more information as it is available,” the first post said. Later, after the first problem had been fixed, Twitter once again experienced issues.
“We’re seeing large bursts of errors every twenty minutes. We’re currently investigating. Update: 08:50 AM PDT: Our sidebar trends feature is exerting an elevated load on one of our databases causing the bursts of errors. As such, we’ve temporarily disabled sidebar trends and the site has fully recovered,” the second message said.
Again, the issue has since been resolved, but there have now been two major problems in just one day. This followed a week of similar issues and fail-whale resurgence. Unfortunately, there’s not that much that Twitter can do about it, as it just may not have the capacity to cope.
In a blog post last week, Twitter explained why there had been so many problems in the previous days. Part of the issue was traced back to “mistakes” that the team had made in managing the internal infrastructure. Twitter has worked to fix those issues and has mostly managed to do so.
Unfortunately, another reason for the issues last week had to do with Twitter’s capacity to handle the surge in activity that it was already seeing, due in large part to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. And since the competition has only just begun, expect the next month to be a rocky ride on Twitter.
“As more people turn to Twitter to see what's happening in the world (or in the World Cup), you may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic. For instance, during the World Cup tournament --and particularly during big, closely-watched matches (such as tomorrow's [Saturday, June 12th] match between England and the U.S.A.)-- we anticipate a significant surge in activity on Twitter. While we are making every effort to prepare for that surge, the whale may surface,” Twitter warned.