Football World Cup : Twitter primed for a month of instability ?

In regards to their sites stability, Twitter concedes that they may be about to witness their worst month in history, with it already off to an interesting start. This is the Football World Cup effect.

Twitter announced last week that it was probable that interruptions will be encountered due to the beginning of the football World Cup, with it being expected that users would overwhelm the micro blogging site. Twitter appears to be playing with fire, setting up a dedicated site linked to the sporting event. Besides taking all of the precautions possible, Twitter admits that they are looking at their "worst month since last October" in terms of site stability.

If we take the Twitter web site’s opinion, this situation is probably not going to get better. Real time updates may be a little slow, with the aim being to hemp avoid service outages during the World Cup, although other problems and their resolution have since been discovered which can at times lead to service interruptions, Twitter explains.

Planned maintenance operations have already been planned, and these should take place very soon. These may also lead to more interruptions, but the maintenance will not be conducted while matches are being played.

Twitter indicates that they are prepared for the impact that the World Cup may have, but concedes that they didn’t anticipate the "complexity linked to the occasion and that they would look at optimising their systems before and during such events."

It is also during the World Cup that Twitter has decided to deploy their geo-localization function - Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com.