US President Donald Trump's tweets generate such massive public engagement and responses that Twitter cannot handle them.
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 they garner caused a breakdown in Twitter's technical infrastructure.
Some people have called the issue 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".
When Donald Trump had tweeted “See you in court, the security of our nation is at stake!”, Twitter user and Founding Editor of Marketing Land Danny Sullivan had replied to the tweet, saying: “Let me give that tweet the Comic Sans treatment it deserves”.
However, Sullivan’s reply to Trump didn’t render – something that he brought to Ed Ho’s notice.
According to Ho, the issue crops up when tweets generate a large number of replies.
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 site-wide 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.
(With inputs from agencies.)
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