It was the rapid-fire spread of this close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River on Thursday which resulted in TwitPic's "freeze".

TwitPic is an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and send them to Twitter posts. 7000 people tried to view the photo of the airplane, and this caused the application to go down.

"In a month's time (something like) this will not affect us anymore, we're working to be able to handle our growth, but this is definitely a wake-up call showing the power of breaking news and TwitPic," said Noah Everret, the founder of TwitPic.

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