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What does it mean when Twitter says it is 'over capacity'?

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3 Answers
Adriaan Pelzer
Adriaan Pelzer, Crypto Developer turned social web - Creative technologist at RAAK, London
To be able to handle as many users as Twitter do, they have to make use of a mechanic called load balancing. That means Twitter does not run on a single server, but on many servers, and every time a user visits Twitter, it sends the user to its least busy server.

This load balancing setup has to be managed according to the amount of users Twitter expects. When Twitter expects many users, they typically start up more servers, and when they expect fewer users, they shut some of them down. This is because server time costs money - they would typically pay for each running server per hour.

Now, sometimes, they'll get these estimates wrong, which means more users are trying to visit Twitter than there are running servers for. That is when you'll get the over capacity message, which will last for as long as it takes them to start up new servers.
8.7k Views · View 10 Upvoters
Richard Drees
Richard Drees, Twitter Engagement Expert | http://buytwitterfollowersreview.org
Answered 116w ago · Author has 75 answers and 312.6k answer views

Hello Steph,

It actually means that there are too many requests being made at the time and the Twitter servers are overloaded beyond what they can handle. This overload means that some users have to wait. Until Twitter’s servers are able to handle it, waiting for a few moments remains to be the solution.

3.3k Views · View 4 Upvoters · Answer requested by Steph Ueng
Dinesh Ramkrishna
Dinesh Ramkrishna, (¯`*•. WE'LL HELP YOU ☀ Deliver Defects Free Software ☀ HELP ➚ Improve your Software Testing Productivity ☼
It means you need to relax a bit till its over with the capacity.. it cant take load of tweets.. needs good QA done.
1.3k Views · View 2 Upvoters

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