For a moment, think of the Internet as a road, and the websites that use cyberspace are destinations. Just like a road, if too many people are using the same infrastructure to get to the same destination, congestion occurs. Traffic slows down or even completely halt. Thus, when a website is overrun with visitors, there may be a delay. However, if the site’s servers are overloaded, the site will completely crash.

This is the scenario that Twitter is worried about. Presently, the popular micro-blogging site has problems managing its traffic, which has grown to 1,375 percent between 2008 and 2009. Today, there are more than 200 million active users generating 65 million tweets a day. With this massive amount of traffic, it is not surprising that there have been many occasions when the site’s services slowed down dramatically or crashed altogether.

Of course, Twitter made vast improvements to improve its user capacity. Despite the enhancements, however, with the rapidly increasing number of Internet users, it is inevitable that a crash will happen again. So what events are most likely to crash Twitter? There are five possibilities.

1. Major news at a geek convention

Huge numbers of tech junkies, film fanatics, and video game addicts regularly tweet to communicate, debate, and interact with each other over the latest gadgets or applications, new blockbusters, or newly released video games and consoles. Thus, any major news that is interesting for these people would result in to millions of tweets, clogging the servers and causing them to crash.

2. Endorsements from celebrities

When Oprah Winfrey began using twitter in April 2009, there was an unprecedented rise of users who used the website. With Winfrey’s tweets, there was a phenomenal Twitter user growth of 83%. This caused the site to slow down and crash.

So if an extremely popular star suddenly uses Twitter to reveal particularly juicy gossip, expect a significant lag in your Tweets—if you are able to send them at all.

3. Elections

Twitter has been used as a political forum for millions of people. It became a very effective platform for politicians to campaign. Unfortunately, with so many users, it is inevitable that the overload will cause trouble for Twitter.

For instance, after the first 2008 presidential debate, usage increased 18.5% and new users increased 23% in just one week. The following debates marked a constant influx of new traffic, sending plenty of Fail Whales throughout the year.

4. Breaking News

Because Twitter provides information in real time, and sending out a message is as easy as sending an SMS, journalists began to use the service as an outlet to gather and send out news and opinions. With hot news spread over the Internet, you bet that there will be huge traffic and outages in the site.

This happened in January 15, 2009 when Jan Krums happened to be on a ferry during the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. He took a picture of the wreck and uploaded it with Twitter. In no time at all, Twitter was posting more Fail Whales than news coverage; new traffic brought by Krum’s image crashed the Twitter service.

5. Internal problems

Twitter is a versatile, effective platform that offers real time information on every topic. However, there is one subject matter that users of Tweeter are hungry to tweet about, and that is Tweeter itself. They usually hit on the inadequacy of Tweeter’s servers to handle an enormous amount of traffic, and the issue becomes extremely magnified. Thus, the next time there is an internal shake-up in the company, expect a long, slow, frustrating transmission of your tweet.