Gmail was down for an unknown amount of time today. Judging by the talk on Twitter some people were still having issues several hours after Google said the problem had been fixed.

This article is about managing user speculation, and the real-time, online discussion that inevitably follows.

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Sooner or later, every site or application will fail. However the consequences depend not only on how the failure is managed but also on how it is communicated. Recently the web hosting company Media Temple and even Google have well illustrated how hard it is for modern connected organizations to respond quickly enough to system outages. Here’s a suggested crisis checklist and notes on the difficulties of always practicing it.

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Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.

An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.

For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)

But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

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