Disaster Friendly arcitecture

All of the following is entirely inspired by the article on the Radar O'Reilly website.

In short, last week M $ began a closed beta test of the new Vine service , designed to monitor and alert in the event of catastrophes and emergency situations. It is planned that this will be a multi-platform (in the understanding of M $) service that allows you to stay in touch with a certain group of people in case of an emergency or for everyday life.
The service is a mashup from LiveMesenger, FaceBook, LinkedIn and allows you to make group alerts and track the location of participants (through a special client).
It also plans to integrate with Twitter, a web interface and clients for Not Windows :-).
Let's see, in principle, a pretty decent communication platform can turn out, but I suspect that in the case of really serious problems, it will be exactly 0. It will
suffer the most in case of any technological disasters: if the communication channels turn out to be undamaged, they get serious overload (remember the blackout in Moscow?).
In any case, you need to look at it closer, signed up for participation in beta testing, I'm waiting for an invitation. If they send and manage to see - I will tell in more detail.