Twitter celebrates the absence of whales during the elections

A few months ago, TechCrunch, Techmeme, and Mashable were dominated by “fail whale” news. The unreliability of Twitter turned Michael Arrington and the likes into a nagging crowd. “OMG, Twitter is down again..!”

Yesterday, it was Twitter who used the OMG phrase. Why? Because they’ve survived the elections. By fixing the weakest points of the system, Twitter now has a “vastly improved performance, reliability, and capacity”. As a result, they could cope all the Twitter users who expressed their hopes, wishes, and anger during that magical election night.

Here are some numbers:

• Updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday
• 7p-9p PST updates up 200% compared to same time last week
• Signups on Tuesday were up 40.3%
• Between 7p-9p PST signups were up 96.5% compared to same time last week
• Messages per second peaked almost 3x compared to first debate

I hope this gives Twitter some confidence and that they’ll renovate certain features like searching for persons.