I Suppose The World Cup Really Is Twitter’s Kryptonite

Over the last couple of years social media has seen a tremendous boost. People who scoffed at it a year ago are embracing it today. As a result, you hear Twitter and Facebook routinely mentioned on television commercials and radio advertisements.

With this increase in popularity Twitter has been going through some growing pains. Those pains have becoming more apparent and began to make headlines on social media and tech news sites. The blame for the downtime has been laid at the feet of the World Cup.

When I first read that bit of news I was a little skeptical. I knew the World Cup was popular among the Twitter crowd but enough to topple the service? We began to see little additions to the service to make tweeting about the game more fun, mainly icons to designate a countries hash tag or the soccer ball for the mention of the game itself.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the World Cup was Twitters Kryptonite. While scanning my Twitter time line, team USA scored a game winning goal and things went crazy. In a matter of mere minutes, my stream was flooded.

The image below is a screen capture taken when the wave of tweets rolled in. The blurred out names are the few accounts that have privacy controls enabled.