According to the Twitch blog, Twitch Plays Pokemon (TPP) has created a large amount of strain on the Twitch chat servers that the Twitch team is quickly trying to remedy. Jason Maestas, Twitch director of customer service, has acknowledged that the issues are connected to TPP.
"The unique nature and huge chat participation in the Twitch Plays Pokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforseen) stress on our chat system," he said. "We're always working on improving the QoS of our chat system, and this has been a wonderful learning experience for us."
On Sunday, Twitch moved the TPP channel off the general chat servers and onto a dedicated event server that is normally used for large-scale events like the League of Legends championships and more. The move did help to a degree, but some problems have persisted.
The phenomena of TPP is a ROM hack of Pokemon Red that has users type inputs into the Twitch chat (A, B, start, up, down, etc.), which a program takes and turns into a command for the character. As time has passed with the game, the developer has made some changes, such as adding a voting system to make the game a bit more beatable.
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Sources:
Twitch
Polygon
