In an ironic twist to the news last week that Stephen Fry can take down websites with a single tweet, .net magazine itself was brought down when Fry tweeted a link to the interview in which he discusses his "power".
In the interview, Fry talked of how a site tweeted by him would often become overwhelmed by a surge of two to three thousand requests a second. So it was no surprise that the site went down just moment after Fry posted a link to the interview on his Twitter with the message "Lordy. I'd forgotten I did this."
"Mr Fry's representatives usually send out what they refer to as a 'severe warning' before he tweets a link," said Dan Oliver, Editor of .net magazine, according to TechRadar.
"You get a mail with the following info: 'A given website should be able to handle 500+ calls per second in order to be able to stay live once Stephen's Tweeted. There are three waves of capacity within that hour with the 2nd wave of retweeting generally as strong as the first'.
"Delighted as we were that Stephen Fry retweeted our video link, we never received a warning, and the site got FRY'D! Thankfully, it was a fairly short outage, and the site was back online within 10-20 minutes."
"I think, considering much of the interview with Fry concentrates on his Twitter influence, the main word associated with our site outage was 'ironic'."
"And it was. We've dealt with big spikes before, but this was simply unprecedented, and yet another example of the huge influence Stephen Fry's Twitter status affords him online."
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