Twitter breaks records (and website)

Twitter

Twitter achieved a record number of tweets in May, but June has seen the website bow under the pressure.

A statement from Pingdom claimed the website had doubled its December record of one billion tweets to reach two billion in last month alone, working out as 64 million tweets a day or 741 tweets per second.

However, there is bad news to dampen the good. Yesterday the site crashed for an hour with no full explanation being offered to users.

A statement on Twitter's status page said: "We had a system-side issue this morning starting around 08:00 Pacific [16:00 BST] that resulted in Twitter.com experiencing two 30 minute back-to-back incidents over roughly one hour."

It added: "The problem has largely been addressed, but we aren't quite to 100 per cent yet."

Twitter, once renowned for its long outages, had only racked up two minutes of downtime so far this month, according to Pingdom, but has now managed to increase it thirty times over in less than a day.

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Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.