If you’re a Twitter user, you’re used to seeing the Fail Whale.  That’s the little fellow above, who pops up every time Twitter reaches capacity or otherwise bogs down with too many Tweets at once.  It used to happen on a daily basis, but a few months ago it seemed like Twitter fixed their fail problem and were handling their massive amounts of traffic pretty well.  Unfortunately, Twitter techs didn’t plan on the World Cup, which has been knocking the service offline and acquainting a whole new generation of users to the Fail Whale.

“The World Cup is probably the biggest organized human event on the planet, with more people paying attention to the same thing at the same time — for a whole month!”  Twitter spokesperson Robin Sloan said.  “We’re checking and double-checking our capacity — although keep in mind that at this point, we’re already handling more than 65 million tweets per day, so while the World Cup is indeed going to be huge, we’re used to huge.”

Tags: World Cup, Fail Whale, Twitter, technology, Twitter capacity strained by World Cup, World Cup tweets causing Twitter outages, Robin Sloan, microblogging, World Cup straining Twitter technology

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