FIFA World Cup Bringing Down Twitter?

CNN.com’s Twitter buzz counted more than 300,000 World Cup-related tweets during the first game, and some data we just received from Trendrr also shows a huge spike, with up to 150,000 tweets per hour during the game (note: the time line on the graph below is MST).

Mark Ghuneim from Wiredset, the agency behind Trendrr, told me a few days ago that he expects the World Cup to be record-breaking. “It will be the largest conversation in social media,” he said.

Twitter already had some availability issues earlier this week, leading to a complete outage of about 90 minutes on Wednesday,


Update: Twitter has published a blog post about their performance issues, detailing how the site has been struggling with increased traffic in combination with some infrastructure changes gone wrong. The post also warns that the World Cup might cause some more outages:

“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 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.”

Src: [newteevee]

FIFA World Cup Bringing Down Twitter?