Ok, I’m just keeping a record of when Twitter is down.  Like now.  The Twitter home page at this time:

This is the kind of thing that everyone is worried about when talking about Twitter.  It’s becoming an extremely useful tool, to the point that some people will claim it to be crucial to their daily communications.

Reliability is a key requirement, and I do know from posts on the Twitter Blog and from news that their looking for staff to monitor and maintain solely from the reliability perspective.  As an IT consultant & engineer/architect, I can be patient, I can understand the problems that scaling and massive growth can put on a platform.  However, many simply see these outages as inability to compensate, or worse, neglect.

Twitter’s engineers and management team will prevail, of that I’m sure, but it’s the timing that I worry about.  Even many of it’s most prominent users are becoming more vocal in their concerns about the service.  Shel Isreal posted An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys on what Twitter needs to address.

With all the talk of how simply useful Twitter is, the “Twitter Guys” need to take note of how important it has become to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people world-wide.  I believe they know, but suggest as Shel does, that they need to communicate more directly, and with more information on what their doing, especially when they’re having some stability problems.  Like today.