- Twitter is working to meet the rising demand with shortened staff and hardware capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Twitter experiencing this level of surged traffic for the first time in its history.
- The impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the company’s infrastructure and the company’s efforts to keep its system running under these circumstances.
There is increased usage of social media platforms after the coronavirus outbreak forced lockdowns around the globe. Twitter is also facing surged traffic under these crises and is trying its best to cope up with the situation.
This week, the company explained that they are working with shortened staff and less hardware capacity to minimize the several impacts of COVID-19 outbreak on its system. Twitter’s top priority is to keep it’s running smoothly to ensure that the users don’t face any difficulty while using the platform. The company has not experienced such an increased usage of the platform in its history. During the past few weeks, there is an increase in the number of users turning to the micro-blogging platform to engage in public discussion. Twitter is going through a critical situation, although its daily monetizable active user count has increased amid COVID-19 situation, yet the company expects operating loss in the first quarter of 2020. The usage of the platform’s Direct Message feature also rose by 30% and there is an increase of 45% in the number of views it is getting on its specially designed page which aims to provide the coronavirus-related information.
This surged usage has stressed the system more than any other event in the company’s history and is expecting additional stress as the virus continues to spread. The company’s physical infrastructure is currently holding the data centers up and working with reduced staff. But the company is also facing issues related to hardware supply necessary to keep its system working. It is because China is not able to ship the supplies in time which also counts as COVID-19 impact.
Twitter states that the company’s complete staff is collectively working to ensure that they stay safe and continues to provide smooth services under these circumstances of surged traffic. We can say that the company is trying its best to meet the ascending demand, but there are more challenges ahead as the pandemic spreads.
Twitter explains that there will not be any major blackouts but the users may face service delays or minor issues as the social network has not dealt with higher demand like this before.
The world is experiencing a lot of ups and downs after the coronavirus crisis and this is one of those impacts. It’s a golden opportunity for social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to highlight the value of connectivity they provide to the world. These platforms are also affected by changes being made to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Twitter says that it shall stay transparent on reporting any of the issues that arise during the pandemic.
Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images
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