Twitter knocking a clients website/server over

[epixmedia]

Hi all, I’m really strugglnig to find a solution to this, and can’t seem to find anyone with a similar problem so I really hope someone here can help!

We have a really strange problem with a website (WordPress). Whenever the client tweets a link to their site the whole server falls over. It doesn’t go offline but all the sites on the VPS become unresponsive for about 30 minutes or so.

No one clicks on the tweets, and its literally the moment its sent the website falls over. Does twitter send some kind of bot to check the URL is legit?? If so could that be causing the problem?

There’s nothing particularly unique about anything we’ve installed on this WordPress site, its a bespoke theme with plugins we use on lots of other sites…

Thanks in advance!

[niall]

Twitter will send a request to your website for a newly Tweeted link to possibly build a Twitter Card for display alongside your Tweet.
https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview

[epixmedia]

Hi Niall. why would that push the server over though? The other sites on the same server are fine when you tweet their URLs…

I thought I had fixed this by deactivating an RSS feed plugin, but the problem has resurfaced and the site/server falls over even if I deactivate all plugins and put a default theme back on the website.

It has me completely baffled!