The root of Twitter's downtime?

Got this in my inbox today:

SB (richstyles) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out SB's profile here:

  http://twitter.com/richstyles

You may follow SB as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

If you check out this guy’s Twitter page, you will notice something rather odd:

• Following 36,053
• Followers 983
• Favorites 0
• Updates 665

So, this means this guy’s inbox must be on fire! If he is really following 36,000 users, the flurry of notifications can become enormous. Facebook placed a limit on the number of friends you can have, I imagine to avoid these kinds of scalability problems. I wonder if this is the reason why Twitter grinds to a halt every now and then.