Torrent of replies to Trump tweets cause Twitter's tumble

US President Donald Trump's tweets generate such a massive public engagement and responses that Twitter cannot handle them, putting a tremendous pressure on Twitter's system.

According to a report in Mashable India on Saturday, many users' replies to Trump's tweets appeared as 'disconnected' from the original tweet, as the massive responses it garners caused a breakdown to Twitter's technical infrastructure.

Some people have called the issue as a matter of censorship but Twitter's Vice President of engineering Ed Ho has clarified that the 'disconnection' between original Trump tweet and replies was caused by a "long standing technical issue".

According to Ho, the issue crops up when tweets generate a large number of replies.

"@dannysullivan @jack it's due to the high number of replies, long standing technical issue, we are working on a fix," Ho said in a tweet.

According to a report in Fortune, Twitter is, at least historically, notorious for uneven handling of system loads.

"But the issue of the disconnected tweets is in some ways even more pernicious than the sitewide outages of yesteryear. Arguments that Twitter was censoring either pro- or anti-Trump tweets might not have been accurate, but they reflected a real erosion of faith in Twitter's openness," the report said.

--IANS

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