Who Broke Twitter?

March 19th, 2007

For the past hour or so, going to Twitter.com hasn’t loaded. No new tweets from the Twittersphere. Just now, a friendly message appeared:

Twitter: down for maintenance — be back shortly!

Yeah… I think someone broke the Internets. Get ready for all kinds of talk about how Twitter doesn’t scale. My theories:

1. It’s the Cylons.
2. Oprah got a Twitter account and the demand to be a follower was overwhelming.
3. Blame Robert Scoble. Too much A-List Blogger Twittering.
4. Talking about Twitter on TWiT.
5. All the traffic from other Twitter related sites led to a reverse Twit effect.
6. (Steve Rubel actually suggests this) It’s a conspiracy to generate even more buzz. What better way to get more attention than a CNN headline: Twitter Outage Causes Geek Pain! And then even more people want to check out Twitter.

Anyhow, maybe this is all just sweet justice — once we get over the Twitter withdrawal, we can use the down-time to blog!