2012 makes Twitter crash

The headline almost reminds us of Y2K, without the hoarding that went into that debacle. Almost as expected, Twitter faced issues on Saturday the 31st of December at around 8:30 pm Indian Standard Time. Japan had hit New Year's Eve at that point, Twitter users flooded the microblog with New Year's greetings. According to the Economic Times, the meltdown occured as 16,197 tweets per second were being sent in Japan. The ever familiar fail whale took up the screen of Twitter users who wanted to read or post tweets to the site and those tweeters using third party clients like TweetBot could not send tweets or retweet existing tweets.

The fail whale welcomed us to 2012

Of course, the jokes about Twitter's meltdown made the rounds on the microblog. According to the Daily Telegraph, one user posted, "Twitter's New Year resolution needs to be I will never go over capacity." Another user said that no three words get them down as much as Twitter: Over Capacity. Outside of Twitter, the people of Tokyo released a helium balloon at the Tokyo Tower, to which they added their hopes and dreams for 2012. A lot of people wished for a better year ahead in light of the earthquake and tsunami that took place in 2011.