Weibo in meltdown over heartthrob Luhan’s new girlfriend
Social network scrambles to get services back on track after surprise announcement causes huge spike in traffic
China’s Twitter-like social network Weibo went into meltdown on Sunday when pop star Lu Han (also known as Luhan) made a surprise revelation about his new girlfriend, online news site Phoenix News reported on Monday.
The noon announcement about actress Guan Xiaotong on Luhan’s official account sent Weibo’s traffic to record levels and paralysed some of its servers.
About half an hour later, Weibo’s customer service team said engineers were working to fix problems stopping some users from refreshing feeds or loading comments or pages.
Server function was fully restored at around 4pm, according to a Weibo programmer.
Luhan, 27, is a former member of the wildly popular K-pop boy band EXO. He and Guan, 20, have just finished shooting the Chinese drama series Sweet Combat, in which they play two students at a sports school who fall in love.