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Twitter is Over Capacity. Please wait a moment and try again. For more information, check out Twitter Status
When Twitter is over capacity, your heart stops - or is that just me. When you load Twitter and you get an error message saying:
Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again. For more information, check out Twitter Status the first thing a lot of people do is think there's a virus. They think their PC has a virus. They think maybe Twitter gave them a virus.
New users might think Twitter is a scam. They want to rant and rage.
But Twitter is a service, just like any other. Sometimes things break.
I think one of the issues is that now you can't use Twitter to tweet:
- Is Twitter down?
- Is Twitter down for you?
You can't load it and read 100 other tweets saying
- Twitter is down!!
- Has Twitter gone?
Because it's not there! Now what'll you do? Well, you could do what I just did - go and make a coffee, step outside and listen to the birds tweeting - that's Twitter that's not over capacity!
Twitter is Over Capacity
When you set up a website service, one of the calculations you do is how many servers you need. How many people will come to your website? How many will rush in at a peak time?
But you can't possibly guess the extra-ordinary.
What if something really major happens? With Twitter it could be a major celeb died and everybody wants to say something about it. Maybe they were Twittering when Facebook went down for several hours in September 2010 and nobody could log in.
A website - and the servers behind it - are similar to your local Wallmart. They guess how many customers they'll have, which helps them to plan the number of car parking spaces outside and the number and size of the doors and the number of tills where customers can pay for their goods.
With a website it's easier to increase the number of servers serving your site, as you can simply put another one in place, rather than having to buy up land next door and do building works. But the principle's the same: if you want more capacity you have to order it, pay for it, wait for it.
Equipment Failure
However, unless you've got unlimited money, you can have all the servers you need, but can still have your website struck down by simple equipment failure.
We've all had that "Oh, my PC crashed". Well that's all servers are really - PCs. They're bigger PCs, admittedly. They have extra systems in place to ensure when one fails the workload passes to another, they will have emergency electricity supplies. But here's a fact: equipment failure will always happen in any system at any time.
So, when big names give you error messages like Twitter is over capacity, just think that some celeb probably just stepped out in the wrong colour top for their skin tone, or maybe a server just died somewhere.
Of course, there's always that big one off event: "somebody pulled out the wrong lead". Maybe the cleaner unplugged the servers to vacuum the floor of the Twitter offices, thinking how lovely and clean it'll be when they start work in the morning.
*shrugs*
So, who knows .... come back later as they suggest, or click that link on their webpage where it says to check Twitter status.
I hope Twitter comes back up for you soon. Good luck!