Yes, Steve is officially in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as Fighter #77 and he’s bringing tons of new content from Minecraft. This includes a stage that has both seasonal changes and a day and night cycle as well as the obvious new Spirits and Music. This content will be shown in the livestream Sakurai Presents later this weekend. But what else did Steve bring to us? Well, he broke two websites, that’s for sure.
When Smash Ultimate revealed that Steve from Minecraft would appear in the game, Twitter had a server shut down from all the traffic. The last time Twitter dealt with a traffic crash like this was when Michael Jackson passed away in 2009. Both Twitter & Google shut down that day. pic.twitter.com/z4nJHCiyhI
— Daniel (@DanielTG85) October 1, 2020
Following his reveal, the social media service Twitter experienced significant downtime and eventually… broke. If you look below, you can see the amount of reports of Twitter being down.
Please note this is relative to my local time here in Japan
This was due to a sudden and unexpected influx of activity due to Steve’s reveal with the majority of the comments saying “Steve broke Twitter!” and “Steve is in Smash!!” It should be noted that a large amount of reports and outages came out from America, the UK, and Japan. The Twitter outages were ignored by the Smash developers with even Sakurai commenting on the outage.
もしかして、Twitter落ちましたね……?
— 桜井 政博 / Masahiro Sakurai (@Sora_Sakurai) October 1, 2020
(You caused it you mad man, you!)
No other character, not even Ridley, Banjo, or King K. Rool managed to do this. I can’t remember a character reveal or video game announcement taking down Twitter. This is monumental and really showed how much of an impact Steve and Minecraft had on the community.
Twitter wasn’t the only website that suffered outages. Even Smashboards suffered an influx of activity that caused significant lag and downtime with pages not loading up or crashing. Even some “user post history” wasn’t showing up in real time. This made both running the site and trying to get the news of the reveal up in a timely manner very difficult. Since his explosive reveal, both sites are back in working order thankfully and are (not?) experiencing trouble. That being said, it’s quite a feat for a single character reveal to effectively shut down Twitter; even for a second.
Author’s Note: I just find it simply hilarious that a character known for building and breaking things apart manages to break down the world’s largest social media site (and Smash site). This is 2020 after all.
Credits
Editing: @Zerp
Graphics: @Zerp
Social Media: @Zerp
Last edited: