Hot Tweet: 5.7 Earthquake Near San Diego Disrupts Twitter

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake centered southeast of Ocotillo, California, near San Diego, hit Twitter at 9:26 p.m. local time, according to the US Geological Survey. While it likely had no geological impact on Twitter's server farms, it immediately interrupted service for Twitter users, including such celebrities as Wil Wheaton, who said his lamps and bird feeders were swaying. Twitter, long the source of flash news for many social media users -- it's how I learn of all my deaths and disasters -- could not take the first-person reporting, and went down for nearly a half-hour.

As I write this post, the "Twitter is over capacity" message is once more displaying, an indication that even an earthquake after which "no damage is reported" is enough to do some damage to the service's capacity. The only other interruption reported was to the Toronto Blue Jays-San Diego Padres, in the eighth inning when Petco Park began swaying during the quake. The game was resumed quickly.