Jobs' MacWorld Keynote Silences Twitter update from January 2008

What do you get when you combine the Internet traffic tsunami of a Steve Jobs MacWorld keynote with the uptime track record of Twitter? Not much Twittering, that's for sure. Bloggers who wanted to track the keynote commentary on Twitter found the service was unusable, hopelessly clogged by activity. It wasn't alone, as the Apple Store and MacWorldExpo sites were also knocked offline by the huge traffic from web surfers trying to view or discuss Jobs' presentation.

Here's the real bottom line on this afternoon's outages: they're nothing new. While I was at Netcraft, the downtime ripples from the MacWorld keynote were an annual event on the Netcraft blog. Both the Apple Store and MacWorldExpo sites were knocked offline during the 2005 keynote and again in 2006. No, Steve Jobs isn't any more powerful today than he was yesterday - at least when it comes to wreaking havoc on web site uptime. It was business as usual for a MacWorld keynote.