Why Is Twitter "Over Capacity"?

Twitter's sometimes overwhelming demand is frustrating for many users.

Twitter’s service, which offers users the ability to update people on what they’re doing in 140 characters or less, is highly addictive for some users. Many people, especially celebrities, send frequent "tweets" throughout the day to keep their followers updated. Because Twitter provides almost instant feedback, it’s considered the ultimate instant messaging system. When Twitter is over capacity and frequent users can’t send messages, it’s similar to being interrupted in the middle of an important phone call.

History

Reports of Twitter being frequently over capacity started in 2008.

In a May 2008 blog post, Twitter announced:

"Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.”

In the blog post Twitter further stated that they were going to rebuild their system "from the ground up" to handle the site’s growth. However, there’s no proof that the measures they've taken have worked. Twitter is still reporting recurring outages as of June 2010.

Significance

After an informal survey conducted in 2008, writer JD Rucker stated, "In a recent inquiry to dozens of online friends, I discovered one truth about Twitter. People either love it and use it daily (even hourly) or they absolutely hate it. Few people fit into the 'moderate feelings' category when the topic came up."

Misconceptions

Twitter is growing, but it is not really expanding. Twitter made a huge splash in the Internet social networking pool in 2007 and has added new users on a daily basis ever since. In fact, Twitter had more than 75 millions user accounts at the end of 2009. However, RJ Metrics reported in early 2010 that a surprisingly large number of Twitter accounts are inactive. Twenty-five percent of Twitter users don’t have any followers, 40 percent have never sent a single tweet, and 80 percent of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets. In December 2009, the service reached an all-time low with an average of only 17 percent of their users sending out messages that month. Although new users continue to create Twitter accounts, less people seem to be actually using them. Even though they’re not being utilized, the large number of inactive or underused accounts still consumes space on Twitter’s servers.

The Whale

The birds carrying a white whale image you see when Twitter is over capacity is actually Twitter’s 503 page. A 503 page is a webpage you’re redirected to when the service is unavailable. Because the image has appeared so frequently in Twitter’s relatively short history, it’s become a joke to some users and a contemptuous annoyance to others. Many people post on forums and other social networking sites that "The Whale just won’t go away!"

Explanations

While Twitter was very forthcoming in disclosing the details of their infrastructure and why the over-capacity errors were happening in 2008, they’ve since resorted to using their Twitter status page to explain current outages. Generally, the messages are very generic, such as these two tweets in June 2010:

"Dealing with high whales (errors) as the result of high load. Ops and engineering are responding."

"We’re seeing periodic high rates of errors on Twitter.com."

More than two years after it first became an issue, as of this writing, Twitter hasn’t given any more detailed explanations about why the outages continue to happen.

References

• WebProNews; Twitter Is Over Capacity; Barry Welford; May 2008
• cnet news; Twitter comes clean on its technical problems; Dan Farber; May 2008
• Twitter Status: Dealing with high whales (errors) as the result of high load
• NowPublic: How Twitter can... ; JD Rucker; May 2008
• The Metric System: New Data on Twitter’s Users and Engagement

Resources

• Check Twitter's Status