Popular micro—blogging site Twitter reportedly crashed yesterday as it was overloaded with New Year messages.

In Britain, the Website crashed at 3 pm (local time) and was out of action for over an hour. It coincided with midnight celebrations in Japan when revellers were said to be sending a record 16,197 tweets per second.

The overload meant no one could post new messages or read existing ones. Instead, frustrated users were greeted with the error message: “Twitter is over capacity.”

The site returned to working order but then stopped on several other occasions, prompting speculation that it was being hit by the arrival of New Year in different parts of the world, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.

One user tweeted: “It’s amazing how three words can ruin my day! Twitter over capacity.” Another joked: “Twitter’s New Year resolution needs to be I will never go over capacity.”

“Some people experienced issues connecting early today,” said Ms Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, in an e-mail to the ‘New York Times’, although she declined to clarify why Twitter went down or for how long the service was unavailable.

Meanwhile, Facebook says it’s ready for the surge in New Year traffic as it expects one billion uploads from people sharing photos and comments via their laptops and smart phones during New Year 2012 celebrations.

Mr Jay Parikh, Facebook’s director of engineering, told the ’Times Herald’ the key is to predict the surge in traffic.

“There is a little bit of a special preparation in terms of watching over it, but it’s not this fire drill. We’ll just kind of run through a pre-flight checklist type of thing,” he was quoted as saying.

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