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Are Tweets Crashing Web Sites?
February 2nd, 2009 : Rich MillerFirst came the Slashdot Effect – the flood of traffic from a link on Slashdot that crashes a smaller site’s web server or exhausts its bandwidth. Subsequent variations have been known as the Digg Effect and the TechCrunch Effect.
Today was the first time I saw a report that a single 140-character message on Twitter -known as a “tweet” – had knocked a site offline. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says his link to a story about using Twitter to find your next job had sent too much traffic and taken the site down (UPDATE: site owner Michael Litman confirms this). The site was indeed unresponsive when I tried to visit it, but is now back online.
This kind of traffic generation is likely limited to power users like Cashmore, who has more than 50,000 followers on Twitter. That total places him among the 20 most widely followed users, according to one estimate. Better watch out for links from Stephen Fry (102,000 followers), Kevin Rose (97,000) and Leo LaPorte (82,000)
UPDATE: Eric notes in our comments that the original tweet seems not have generated an enormous number of click-throughs. Pingdom points to the potential for “retweeting” – the practice of forwarding a tweeted link to your own list of followers – as a traffic multiplier. Cashmore is the most frequently retweeted Twitter user, according to ReTweetist (as noted at The Next Web).
There was a time when this chain reaction of activity in the wake of power users was seen as a drag on Twitter’s performance, prompting a spat with Robert Scoble, the service’s uber-Tweeter at the time, who felt he was being scapegoated for Twitter’s infrastructure failings.
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I crashed my own Wordpress blog last week, as a matter of fact, by putting a link to a post about a Windows 7 UAC flaw. I’ve since installed memcache to help with traffic in future, but you can bet I’ll be cautious about linking to my own site in future!
@Rch Miller: Twitter users are hungry readers.. Does your site looks slower to access after you reached Techmeme?
According to bit.ly’s plug in, that tweet received 113 clicks total. Either the dude’s blog is held together with duct tape or (more likely) Mashable (the site) was responsible for the heavy traffic. Site owner Michael Litman’s tweet seems to confirm the latter.
I call this as Scobleizer effect 
“Scobleizer effect is the phenomenon of a popular twitter user tweeting a link of a smaller site, causing a sudden enormous spike in the site traffic. The link spreads rapidly with several users retweeting the same and results in more small traffic spikes.”
Eric,
How is bit.ly relevant here? The link was shared with tinyurl. Anyway, we’re doing some traffic analysis on retweets this week and we’ll post our findings.
Also, we *did not* mention the site on Mashable.com – only the Twitter stream – crediting Twitter with the traffic is accurate.
Nice. I guess it’s best these high-profile tweeple do not retweet any links to my poor little blog….
I wonder if coralizing a website could really help against this effect. Proxy servers are designed just to take the load protecting the server behind it. It would be nice to test this and have results posted somewhere…
About the name: “Twit-out” is not so bad hun?
“That site has been Twitted-out”. It sounds great! 
Cheers,
Dan
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Posted February 9th, 2009[...] bring a website to its knees. There was then the digg effect. Now mashable tells about the “Tweet effect“, when a user with 40.000 followers links to [...]
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