[nl]

I can say this because I was part of a service in 1999 that had more users and volume (bytes/hits/etc.) yet didn't have nearly the same issues.

Not to be rude, but I doubt it.

Twitter currently has 175 million users[1]. Estimates in 1999 for the online population of the entire internet were 259 million, with 110 million in the US [2].

In 1999, I imagine Yahoo and maybe a couple of other sites (Microsoft/Excite/AOL/Lycos?) were getting similar traffic numbers to what Twitter does today. BUT the scaling is very different, because Twitter requires fan-out of messages, which none of those sites did.

[1]: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371826,00.asp

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000208141450/http://c-i-a.com/1...