As Twitter turns 5, it delivers 350B 'tweets' per day

15.07.2011

Speaking during his company's second-quarter earnings call, Page said that, although Google+ is still in a limited trial phase and available only by invitation, about 10 million people have signed up for the site. They share about 1 billion items every day.

"Delivering 350 billion Tweets a day is a terribly fun engineering challenge. But, it doesn't capture how passionate our users are," the post by Twitter's Engineering team reads.

Looking back, Twitter has improved tremendously its site stability, availability and performance, which early on were notoriously uneven, making the service vulnerable to frequent outages, slowdowns and glitches.

Today, Twitter's "Fail Whale" graphic, which became a mainstream symbol for things gone wrong, is seen much less often, and the company has moved on to other challenges, such as building a sustainable revenue stream based primarily on online ads.

Twitter is also facing discontent from some longtime developers who created applications that provided complementary functionality for the site, only to find that in the past 18 months or so, Twitter has decided to build those features natively into its service.