I wasn’t planning on writing this post today but then it happened again and again just after it had happened over and over again and again. You get what I mean? Ever tried logging on to your personal Twitter account and then the big Twitter Whale appears with the message – Twitter is over capacity: Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again? I agree it could be quite frustrating. While 503 error pages are not uncommon on the Internet, one would expect an organisation as huge as Twitter to be able to improve their servers to handle the ever growing number of tweets and traffic generated.
I remember a status update, from Twitter, about 2 years ago concerning ‘seeing lots of over capacity errors and long load times’. The response then was ‘We ‘re working on this problem’ and ‘temporarily reducing the API rate limit to 20 requests per hour in order to help address the latency issues we ‘re seeing’. Fast forward, June 11 2o1o, a similar problem occurred with reports of ‘several incidences of poor site performance and a high number of errors due to one of our internal sub-networks being over-capacity’ which led to Twitter doubling the capacity, improving the monitoring and re-balancing the traffic on their internal network to redistribute the load.
Apparently, not much has changed since then. While it is true that sometimes there are unprecedented spikes in traffic which can result in internal server errors such as during the FIFA World Cup, more needs to be done as soon as possible to avoid alienating users and ensure that such occurrences are very few and far between.
Click Here to check Twitter’s performance and availability status updates.
Talking Point
What will it take to stop you from tweeting?