Twitter: Down at 8:50 AM CT

January 30, 2008

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.

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Comments

Comment by Dave Simon on January 30, 2008 @ 9:35 am

Semi-new to the Twitter community, this is my first “Twitter Down” experience of a fairly long term. It’s kinda scary when Twitterific just spins!

Now I’ll go get work done. LOL

Comment by chris on January 30, 2008 @ 2:34 pm

it was down a lot during the mac keynote speech. i was a little frustrated too because i get a lot of live blogging from those types of events from twitter.

i’m sure they notice during big events they are crippled. hopefully they will upgrade their servers soon to compensate.

Comment by Rick Mahn on January 30, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

Dave, welcome to Twitter! I’m now following – look forward to future Tweets!

Chris, Yeah, that was a frustrating two days. It was almost worse because you could use the web, but not a client like Snitter or Twhirl. Anyway, I’m not sure what caused it today, but I’m sure they posted on the blog about it.

Pingback by Another Day, Another Twitter Outage : The Last Podcast on January 30, 2008 @ 10:18 pm

[...] the one hand, the fact that this freaks people out is a sign that Twitter indeed is the crack cocaine that keeps the Web [...]

Pingback by Twitter’s down yet again: Twitter is over capacity. at kyleabaker.com on May 25, 2008 @ 12:25 am

[...] if it isn’t bad enough that Twitter has been the target of much critism lately due to their poor site stability, they are down [...]

Comment by C. Laeuse on August 9, 2008 @ 6:01 pm

Forgive them for this downtime

Comment by Bevardis on August 10, 2008 @ 5:09 am

O.O

Comment by Dueces on August 12, 2008 @ 1:37 pm

Ahan

Comment by RandyBrown on August 16, 2008 @ 5:21 pm

Nice Site. I am new here but will be visiting more often as you have done a good job.

Thanks

Comment by Ryan on August 17, 2008 @ 5:13 am

Forgive them

Comment by Tyrone on August 19, 2008 @ 1:26 am

Yes I would say like Ryan. Forgive them:P

Comment by nick on September 1, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

hey, love the blog – i will try and keep up with it!! please keep more coming I wish I could start a blog but I don’t have much time Thanks, nick

Comment by serge network monitoring on September 19, 2008 @ 6:45 am

downtime happens with every service i think. there are no webprojects working online 100% of time up. so forgive and forget about it

Comment by Rowers on October 20, 2008 @ 7:00 am

I find it quite funny.. anyways forget it and forgive them.

Comment by BOL on October 22, 2008 @ 1:01 am

I love Twitter and I remember this down time but it is a case of forgive them and get on with things otherwise life will just become much more stressful than it already is.

Comment by Free sms to India on December 2, 2008 @ 2:59 am

It give a bit strange feeling, but it all depends upon the taste of the user.

Thanks for sharing.

Comment by Baez Carolina on December 5, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

Great blog – just wanted to give credit where credit is due!

Comment by Eco consulting services on December 17, 2008 @ 6:57 am

Hi,

Thanks for sharing such a great observation, i’ll try to avoid that time for using twitter.

Comment by Busana Muslim on January 6, 2009 @ 11:51 pm

hey great share.
i like twitter too..

Busana Muslim´s last blog post..ka, Sleep Tight & Have Nice Dream

Comment by Steve on January 10, 2009 @ 11:50 am

This is a great article which really gives a good look at the overall credit market.Really like your positive attitude for the new year as well!

Comment by Rick Mahn on January 10, 2009 @ 1:49 pm

Ugh, obvious you guys really don’t use Twitter to the same extent as some of us. It’s become a critical communication venue for me, and a year ago when I wrote this post, they simply did not have the reliability issues taken care of.

The other half of it is that I’m an IT infrastructure guy. I know what it takes to plan for and implement for scaled growth of services. They failed. It’s as simple as that.

Now, a year later, they’ve finally got a pretty good handle on their scaling issues. They had a rocky road for about 4 months last year, and I’m glad Ev & crew have that figured out now.

Oh, and Steve, I’m glad you liked the “credit market” aspect of this post.