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:

image

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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Categories: services, social networks, twitter, web 2.0

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  • Twitter surely has emerged out tremendously beyond its embryonic stage and size but still has a lot of issues that need to be addressed...but thumbs up for the reliability credits...the 'Twitter Down' experiences happen only on terribly bad days...
  • michelle001122
    It has been down only once since I used it. And I think it is obvious as millions of people around the globe have started using it. In time it will improve it capabilities.
  • Nice post! I really like your site design. Just thought I'd drop a line, take it easy!
  • Ravi
    Well you sure have passion. i wish i had as much as you do but I am working on it. Motivational stuff. Thank You
  • 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.
    ;-)
  • 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!
  • Eco consulting services
    Hi,

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