Twitch Plays Pokemon has become so popular that it's ruining other Twitch streams as users flock to its chat, the streaming site stated. When the unusually massive number of viewers are using the chat simultaneously to participate in the hilarious social experiment, other Twitch streams report lag or total breakdown of their chats.
"The unique nature and huge chat participation in the Twitch Plays Pokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system," Customer Experience Director Chris Maestas wrote on their blog. "We're always working on improving the QoS of our chat system, and this has been a wonderful learning experience for us."
To help solve this, Twitch has begun moving some of the general chats to a dedicated event chat sever to free up bandwidth. Traditionally, they have used these dedicated chats during events that they know will make the site see a lot of traffic and conversation, such as The International Dota 2 tournament or League of Legnds LCS.
Maestas states that this change helped, but also that it revealed some "fundamental issues" with the chat infrastructure. Twitch will be making improvements to the backend of the chats, so it's good to see other positives coming out of what has been a fun and interesting experiment. It's pretty impressive (and says a lot about Twitch Plays Pokemon) that the one stream is gathering as much traffic as these big gaming events.
Twitch says that they "LOVE Twitch Plays Pokemon" and want to see where this ride takes them. We love it too, Twitch, and are glad to see they're both enjoying it and using it to better their services. You can watch the live stream here, where it's been going for 7 days.