June 18, 2010

Twitter can't handle the load

In the past few weeks many users have been noticing several problems with the popular social networking site Twitter. Sean Garrett of the Twitter communications team has made a post on the Twitter blog about the recent problems they have been having.

Twitter were trying to get their systems ready in time for the starting of the World Cup but complications caused the maintenance to take far longer than anticipated. They have been trying to tweak their systems with very small, minor changes. However, these small changes have led to the discovery of deeper issues with the site. This is what is causing the unexpected downtime that users have been experiencing. This coupled with the huge increase in traffic due to the World Cup has led to Twitter's worst month since last October in terms of up-time and stability.

The problems are not over either, Twitter is planning several periods of "down-time" in the coming two weeks in order to finish their maintenance. They have, however, promised that prior notice will be given to users and the down-time will not affect people tweeting over the World Cup games.

There is good news though, the changes that they are currently implementing "will make Twitter much more reliable in the future" and will hopefully reduce the chances of this happening again.

No comments: