Synchronized Tweets Twat Twitter

[Samurai_Jerk]

No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Huge Problem for Twitter

Twitter engineer Mazdak Hashemi says the Japanese tweet like no one else on earth.

When the New Year arrives or even as they watch certain moments in shows and movies broadcast on national television, tens of thousands of Japanese will tweet at practically the same instant. “Everyone tweets at the New Year, but the Japanese are more in-sync,” says Hashemi, who, as Twitter’s director of site reliability engineering, works to make sure its mini-messaging service stays in good working order. “They do it at exactly midnight.”

This provides a small window into the unique culture of the Japanese, known for exhibiting a certain type of conformity, but there was a time when it was also an enormous problem for Twitter. As the year 2012 arrived in Japan, the country’s synchronized tweets crashed Twitter’s entire service, worldwide. It was 3pm in Britain when the site went belly-up.

[matsuki]