At first I thought it was just another Twitter outage, and then (after a couple of hours of Twitterrific not working) I tried connecting to Twitter directly:
There isn’t a page on Twitter (including their blog) that can be accessed as I write this (3:30am PST Thursday). It may just be sugar coating on yet another period of downtime; an alternative to the Twitter downtime bird that replaced the Twitter cat some time ago, but if it is, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. On the other hand, something might be going on at Twitter: more stable servers perhaps? or even a new feature launch? Watch this space.
Update: Twitter back up as at 5am PST. A notice on Twitter states that Twitter would be down for 2.5 hours from midnight, looks like they were 50% of the way there is terms of downtime. At the time of writing there is nothing on the Twitter blog explaining the reason for the downtime. Looks like a regular outage with sugar coating.
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And just when I was about to change the world with my twitter announcement of my new Creative Commons novel! Damn you lady luck!
I actually just tried to get on twitter and post and I couldn’t. Honestly, my patience is running out. They need to just take the damn thing offline, fix it and relaunch. They would be smart not to forget what happened to Friendster when they had constant downtime and slowdowns.
drunk staff with a bottle in hand must have had walk in a server room:)
Duncan - there was a LARGE message on twitter last night that it would be down for several hours this morning.
Why are users so demanding? I think sometimes we need to be a little bit more patient.
Allen - did they saw why they’d be down?
Unconfirmed reports that Leah Culver was seen exiting the Twitter server room with what she thought were hot-swappable drives.
I checked my cache to see if I had the page but it’s not there. I believe it was as something like “twitter will be down for several hours as we perform some operations” or something like that. some of the people on my buddy list kept noting that they were upset that it would be down.
Duncan, once again, no news is…well no news.
Let’s get some real stories. Not this “someone might be down, what’s up?” Cmon! This story is so lame. You need to start thinking about a new job.
Who the hell cares that Twitter is “twits up” for a few hours.
Maybe they’re finally putting in a tagging function. And a thread search. And a way to pingback blogs. Oh, if only…
Michael,
Did you mention Friendster? Currently, the crap of a community portal now has absolutely a stupid flash ad that is filling up the background, promoting Twisties Chipsters!
Is it they’re last resort in gaining revenue? Flash Ads in the background? I’m definitely not touching the crappy friendster EVER again.
I’m okay with the twitter downtime, at least I don’t get flooded with ads.
Phil
a lot of people use Twitter, like it or not, so it becomes news. If gmail, Reader or Facebook was down with a similar message we’d report it. Good Australian name BTW
Now that Twitter is down, how will I tell all my peeps that I just watered my plant and washed my hair.
Duncan, in all fairness I agree with Phil.
You were advised that they were tweaking the site and that it was down.
Do want them to send you personal email updates every 5 minutes?
Non story , especially now that it’s back up….
John
according to an interview with Ev Williams on RW/W yesterday 10x more people access Twitter via the API (ie third party apps) than via the Twitter site itself; so no, like the vast majority of Twitter users I wasn’t advised of the outage…mind you, an email just on the odd occasion letting users know what’s going on wouldn’t go astray, not every 5 minutes but perhaps once in a blue moon even!
Twitter also put up a different message for a change that suggested something interesting might be going on; as I’ve now noted in the post it looks like sugar coating, but it at least sounded interesting at the time. Back to regular outages I guess
It’s back on line!
Sorry about that… It WAS up for a minute… :s
Ah well, aren’t we all more productive when we get a day without Twitter anyways?
How many times does it take to fix the problems. It is getting to be down as much as it is up.
I haven’t been able to import my gmail contacts for over a week and emailed them about it yesterday. Is it too much to hope they are fixing that?
Seems like it’s still down for me at 13:20 BST (05:20 PST), it’s been down since at least 09:00 BST.
Am I more productive? Nah, I’m twitchy and getting withdrawal symptoms.
Mark - go to bed. The world will not end if you can’t twitter for a couple hours at 3 in the morning.
Hopefully there will be new futures - like groups and open discussions.
Did twitter grow too fast? In all seriousness, does anyone know what the problem with the service is? I hope that they get all their issues worked out because I like the simplicity of it, but every day its down the gap between it and Pownce gets smaller.
I tend to get annoyed when my contacts update their Twitter feeds too much. I think the best way to live life is to use Twitter so little that you don’t notice it when it is down. (I didn’t notice.)
I am reminded of the episode of The Simpsons when TV is banned and everyone actually goes outside…
startups like twitter fail to realize the importance of a solid infrastructure. They get what they pay for with the hosting companies….
OK, looks like it’s down again (6:30PST)….now there’s a surprise. Not
You can’t have it both ways, people. We have this renewed charge of energy called web 2.0 mostly because the cost of entry is so low. How many blog posts have you read about how you don’t need to start with huge infrastructure to launch your new uber app. You can just grow with your users.
Well… that’s what is happening here. Sure, they’re probably down a little more than users would like. But, hey, would any of us be Twittering right now if the creators had held off on their idea until they had built the perfect infrastructure for such a system? No.
This is all part of the natural order. Either they swim or sink as Jaiku or Pownce charge ahead.
How come all of sudden I have all these great things I want to Twit. We should all start a second Twitter for when Twitter goes down.
Twitter is like the telephone to me, except I use it much more. The apparent instability of the API is awful. Downtime as frequent and as long as it is is intolerable as Twitter is one of the key tools I use for my work. I hope they are throwing a whole lot of that new money at these problems - I’m not looking forward to rebuilding my network of contacts at one of the other microblogging services.
JASON - Exactly what I was about to type!
Geez, do you REALLY need it at 3:00am??
@ Jason Adams: Complaining about a twitter bug might not get it fixed, but it might get you a tshirt, as I discovered!
My username is still “thatcanadiangir” without the L, since they truncated usernames to 15 chars, but at least I have the tshirt to prove I tried to get it fixed :S
Twitter is back, but no new features.
You people are out of control. Twitter is getting ready for the MTV Awards this weekend and had some announced system upgrades.
And seriously, what is up with the “I must twitter ***now***”
I used twitter for a little bit but then became lazy to take time out to type everything that I am doing each minute. I guess unless I start getting addicted to it or something, having to go there and type what I am doing…seems like work to me.
Hey all,
What was supposed to be routine maintenance (which we’re working hard to make transparent to users) ended up being more complicated, and kept me up all night. We’re now back up, but there might be a few hiccups this morning.
Sorry for any inconvenience, and thanks for your patience. We’ll have a blog post up shortly.
Blaine (twitter.com/blaine)
ps, if anyone has ideas for how we might best handle scheduled downtime via the API, we’d love to hear them - send your suggestions to the developers list. We have a few ideas, but we’re not thrilled with any of them.
Its still down for me.
It’s been nice to have it down, I’ve gotten more work done this morning :p
It was up for a while, but at 10:08 MST it is down again.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve career management ::
I deleted my Twitter account a few months ago and haven’t missed it a bit. What a waste of time. I mean really, who cares what YOU are doing right now?
What are you doing?
Signing OFF from Twitter. It is time to say goodbye!
Not because of services downtimes, but personal productivity downtimes reading useless tweets.
As of 12:22 PM EST, I am still getting the “Twitter is being upgraded!” message.
This was an announced maintenance. We need to be patient, not everyone has the benefit of a decades of scaling large web services like Google or Amazon.
Alex
I was recently a customer of Textdrive/Joyent, which I believe is Twitter’s host. They seemed very busy with another customer and I bailed to another host. The real story here is some information on the host and architecture - and confirmation of the issues causing the downtime.
please visit my website http://dilemmo.info
I am based in the UK and it appears to have been down the whole day. Grrr. As of 6.26pm it is still not up and running.
Looks like it’s still down. So much for a scheduled maintenance. http://www.newsplays.com
Twitters new status:
“Our scheduled maintenance got off schedule. We’re aware of the problem and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
I have yet to find a -productive- use for Twitter ; )
I still dont get ths..can someone who is not a teenager,and a heavy twiiter user, shed some light on why thy like this svc and how they have the time to input their daily activities let alone follow someone elses…
Did anyone notice that they said in their last newsletter that they’re going to be on the MTV video music awards this weekend. Perhaps they’re just getting ready and ramping up parts of it.