Twitter Swamped by iPad Announcement

Written by CNET's Caroline McCarthy

Seriously, Twitter? We thought the company had learned by now that Steve Jobs has the mystical power to instantly summon the fail whale -- or in other words, that nerd chatter surrounding any kind of Apple product announcement is enough to swamp the microblogging service's infrastructure.

An hour before Apple's San Francisco event to the much-hyped tablet device now known as the iPad, Twitter had already slowed to a crawl, spitting out tweets between eight and fifteen minutes late -- and sometimes out of order -- on both the Twitter.com home page and third-party clients. It doesn't seem like there were any outright appearances of the "fail whale," though.

Around 10 a.m. PT, Twitter updated its status blog: "We are investigating the source of tweet delivery delays this morning." You don't say!

Back in the day, a high volume of tech news was enough to completely down Twitter--the company was tiny, its servers were mediocre, and its user base was dominated by Silicon Valley punditry. Now that it's grown much bigger and more stable, news-related outages have become rare.

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