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Twitter got its big break with mainstream America today — a big article in the free Ramada Inn daily, USA Today. In fact, the article drove so much traffic to Twitter that — whoops — it crashed. Again. "They used to call it the Slashdot Effect," Valleywag's resident Olds Paul Boutin tells me, "Your site would go down right in the middle of your moment of glory." Smartly, though, Twitter PR managed to get USA Today's Jefferson Graham to build an excuse for the site's Love For Fail right into the article. Graham reports:

Twitter has become so popular, so fast, that keeping up with its fast-growing user base is a real issue. So many people now use Twitter to update friends that the system often crashes. That could be about to change. Twitter executives are working feverishly to solve the problem through a new investment. "Twitter took off really quickly, and honestly, we were surprised and had to play a lot of catch-up," says Stone.