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World Cup Coverage Brings Down Twitter, Or A Plot By Twitter Team USA?

Twitter, social media and especially Facebook play an important role in the lives of millions of people in the US and around the world. The football world cup is being played in South Africa during June, and billions of people are projected to watch the World Cup games in June and July 2010.

Many of the games are being watched on TV, but this year, the competition is being heavily followed on social media.

PC World reports that so much attention is being played to the World Cup that fan's tweets may have cause outages at Twitter. Twitter has apologized for the outages, and claims bugs and the coverage on the World Cup are to blame.

Cynical observers might suggest that Twitter is pointing to the World Cup when issues closer to home are to blame.

However, reading this great article on NPR that describes how over the weekend people have the freedom to watch matches on TV, but during the week employees are using social media to keep tabs on the progress of games, may point to the fact that the World Cup is having an effect. Especially when you review the response times and up-time % on the weekends over the last two weeks compared Twitter up-time to during the week. Except for downtime on Sunday June 13th for 1 hour and 1 minute, both World Cup weekends have had 100% up-time. You can see more about up-time from pingdom.

Now although I'm English, I'm not all that big a soccer fan, my Dad is American and was a club pro, so he was more into golf. But I grew up kicking a football around. So I have certain loyalties when it comes to soccer. I took another look at the up-time for games involving Group C teams, Group C is the group where England and the USA play. I noticed, the Eng vs USA game was 100% up on Twitter, while the other Group C game was out for 1 hour and 1 minute on June 13th. And Twitter was down on June 18th for 22 minutes, USA played but there was also another Group C game. I wonder where those 22 minutes of downtime went?

Tongue in cheek, I'm wondering if we have some very die hard USA soccer fans at Twitter server central? I'm just saying... ;-)

2010 World Cup Matches and Twitter Up-time

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