Some people may have been victim to the Digg effect, Slashdotted, being stumble’d or now, more recently been affected by masses of hits from twitter.
Twitter has recently overtaken digg in traffic rank, according to alexa.com, with a reach of 0.2% at the time of writing.
twitter, stumbleupon and digg
There are various twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers (people who subscribe to the user’s updates), such as Stephen Fry, Barack Obama and Kevin Rose to name a few.
Tweets from particularly popular users which link to a website can cause problems for most websites which aren’t supported for bursts of large amounts of users. Earlier today Stephen Fry posted a link to a site which within 15minutes pushed the server over it’s CPU Quota.
Earlier in the day again, a link was posted to his own web shop, which promptly brought thousands of users and slowed the server down significantly
Regular users can also cause temporary downtime for some sites if a particular link is retweeted enough times..
Not that any of this is a bad thing, more traffic to sites is always a good thing, you’ve just got to make sure your host can handle it!
