Have you seen your twitter page shows like this? “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” Are you frustrated? Don’t worry, you are not alone. This is one of the hottest discussions in web.
In Technical Term: You are getting this message because you are being redirected to Twitter’s 503 page (503 Service Unavailable page).
HTTP status code 503 (503 Service Unavailable) indicates that twitter Web server is currently unable to handle the request because of a temporary overload or maintenance of the server.
Why Twitter server is overloaded?
Sometimes twitter traffic is very rapidly and its Web server is unable to handle rapid amount of request in very short period of time (server temporary overload), hence you are getting “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets!….”.
So, why twitter server is overload? Twitter has become the SMS of the Internet. Because of its restricted 140 characters per post, It has become the hottest thing in social networking. Everyone from big companies, to CEO’s (@ExecTweets) to youngsters’ uses Twitter. According to Forrester estimates around five million people use Twitter, this causes overload.
What is the Fix?
Ultimately Twitter has to fix it’s overload issue. Until then, Please wait a few minutes before trying.
Follow us at @thepicky on Twitter
This error message getting really annoying. I hope it gets resolved soon.
30 days later & still getting Twitter is Over Capacity
Still getting it! It sucks
Great page. doesn’t really help though at all.
A bit like a “Why won’t my car start?” page that informs me “Your car is old and broken. Once you get a new car it will start just fine!”
Don’t really give a c*** about twitter.. But a prospective employee has it, and looking for insight pertaining to his personality.. This could be the end all of his opportunity right here, but I can’t get his page up..
i can’t change my twitpic because of this! ergh
Twitter needs to fix this problem before they lose a lot of people. Facebook has never said this to me before..hmmm…something to think about.
fierly the mesasge is shown however the picture is changed! look @ it!
lol its a bug and it sucks, i hate bugs in famous sites like youtube & others.. like if they dont spend a cent paying a competent programmer..
It is one thing to be over capacity – every once in a while – but at 6 AM?? and for almost a week?? I am to the point that I am going to try Google Buzz and reload Facebook… there is nothing LIKE twitter except when there is NO twitter AT ALL!! — then… one must see what other social networking options exist. THIS PROBLEM, I PREDICT, WILL BE THE DEATH OF TWITTER…. IT IS GOING TO DIE…. because they can’t solve an over load problem… and build greater capacity…. people will use other alternatives…
I can’t belive that this message is all about capacity.. I get this on times where the traffic even for an international website like twitter should be low and i feel like that it’s getting worse every week.. Can’t even stay on twitter for more then five minutes without this message appears.. Hope they fix it soon
It cos all those little birds in the pic aren’t flying in the same damn direction
i have twitter account, but no tweet and no followers.
i have twitter account, but no tweet and no followers. lol
This whole thing is so damn annoying … it’s becoming more frequent too
I am getting to the point where i want to cancel my twitter account. This needs to stop.
This is happening 75% of the time I try to use Twitter. A real pain that’s making the site useless to me.
Cindy, that’s so cute that you think this will be the death of Twitter. Just like any drug, these companies get users hooked, then the only thing that will ween them off the addition is the net big thing, or time itself. But trust me, hahahahaha, this will not be the death of Twitter!
It seems twitter have not good performance engineer to solve this issue .
They should give importance of Web performance issue .
Annoying as hell. Twitter, BUY MORE SERVERS!!! Its weird because twitter is the only network I have this problem on and I get it all the time on twitter regardless of what Im doing.
At the moment twitter is over capacity because we are having elections in our small country; the netherlands. A country with only 16milion inhabitants, posts a stunning 1000 tweets par minute!! we are a trending topic. Words like; paars, pvda, vvd, verkiezingen; that’s dutch!
Cindy don’t be so stupid… It’s not 6 AM everywhere in the world at the same time…
Dang. I was just about to tweet about the Twitter over capacity issues. Isn’t that ironic?
Instead of using main Twitter home page, you guys can download Tweetdeck. It doesn’t have over capacities or any errors.
According to status.twitter.com ,the reason for this page on 14th of June 2010 is a scheduled maintance. Everyday, they come up with a new reason but not a solution 🙂
I believe this “over capacity” page will be the death of twitter.
why bother having twitter if those responsible can’t keep Twitter going then why bother at all? just close it down or alternatively get rid of accounts that sit dormant taking up valued space. Mind you, charging a small fee say $5.00 per annum would help too
twitter cant handle this simple text tweet problem? but how facebook manage to handle their server even though they have a million subscriber regardless of different media types (images, videos, apps, etc…) they have?
this sucks
oh come on ! this has gone on for hours !
Twitter is over capacity.
Please wait a moment and try
again. For more information, check
out Twitter Status »
twatters : LOL
this is hilarious. “According to Forrester estimates around 5 people use Twitter, this causes overload.”
Its been happening more frequently recently.
@Cindy
Remember about 60% of twitter’s users are from outside the US, so that may be peak time in other countries.
Well It’s July now and still no help…yesterday i got to change my pic but when i went to change it again…over capacity!
Twitter get some gosh darn help already! Please?!
I can’t change my twit pic either. The message comes up and says “wait a moment and try again.” I’ve waited many moments, in fact I’ve tried every day for the past week and I’m still getting the same message.
How is twitter overloaded at 2 in the morning and why does twitter’s over capacity problem affect me changing my profile picture?
I guess I just don’t understand.
All I know is that I have never had this problem with any other social networking system, and if twitter doesn’t get this fixed soon….
This is rather ridiculous, its actually impossible to even as much as set an account up under these conditions. I think the timeouts would be OK, if Twitter was set up to actually retain your data and send you back a page rather than the current disconnected and irrevertable 503 page.
Twitter’s grown too fast. I reckon the servers just can’t keep up. It’s been an issue for several months. Sad to see.
happened to me too for the @#$% time!!!
let’s start a facebook Twitterfan-NOT page…
Well I’m about to leave Twitter for good too… Haven’t had a success in editing my settings…. and I really liked twitter…..
Pathetic!!!
RT @Cindy It is one thing to be over capacity – every once in a while – but at 6 AM??
RT @Tori How is twitter overloaded at 2 in the morning…? I guess I just don’t understand.
Because it’s 1pm, or 7pm somewhere else? You guys must be one of those USA-is-my-universe-slash-well types. 😉
All I wanna do is delete my Twitter account…and I can’t even do that…wtf…One of the reasons I do not like Twitter…
Same as mine! I can’t change my twit pic too! it’s really annoying.. i have been trying all day but the stupid whale just keeps on showing up! really, they SHOULD fix twitter. Hope it’ll work sooooonn.. >:\
This is ridiculous, I’ve been getting this message for weeks now, its impossible that its over capacity all the time, what a crappy website.
I’ve been trying to change the Design on my Twitter account for a year now, and they simply won’t let me. As for tweets, they are running smoothly as always. I just get the WHALE info, when I try to change the design. 🙁
urgh, i can’t change my twit pic of this. then when i click ‘status’ it says network error. wtf twitter. FIX YOURSELF. -.-
I wonder when the bubble Twitter will pop. Because they still only live by investments and are in need of many many servers.
Twitter needs to spread out servers across the globe, so servers can handle requests from their respective countries which would handle request overload (which is the main issue) . I am almost dead sure that Twitters main issue is coming from Database Accessing issues, which as far as my knowledge goes is a very hard problem to fix (remember that adding a new database system to handle requests still requires intergration to the existing database)