Twitter dumped Joyent as its hosting provider late yesterday (see our report here) and it was presumed by some that the switch away form Joyent was due to the poor reliability of the service. We later learnt that Twitter had switched to Verio, and this is where the rumor mill gets interesting.
According to one source, the move to Verio wasn’t related to issues with Joyent, but due to a yet to be disclosed investment from Japanese telco NTT, who are also the full owners of Verio. They did not provide the amount of the investment or terms, but they suggested it was finalized at the same time the Digital Garage investment was announced. Apparently it had been a done deal for months prior to that, hence the talk that Twitter had been planning a move away from Joyent for months. The Digital Garage deal was announced January 16, so presuming reasonable preparations before that, 15 days after signing to make the move is a reasonable enough time frame.
There is some sense in the notion that NTT may have been involved along side Digital Garage in taking a strategic investment in Twitter. Although both companies are separate, they often cross paths in Japan, and staff such as Stuart Woodward have worked for both. Twitter’s still strong roots as a mobile offering would also appeal to NTT, particularly as Google tries to break into Japan with Jaiku one of the platforms they may eventually be offering, and Digital Garage is creating a Japanese version, so all the better if NTT gets the mobile version of that exclusively on their phones. NTT does however have a search deal with Google, but no doubt due to the promised financial returns from it as opposed to any greater love for Larry and Sergey.
This is an unconfirmed tip so we’ve put an email into Twitter for comment on this, and if we get a response we’ll add it.
On the reliability side, the move to Verio isn’t going well for Twitter so far with regular down time, delayed messages and related issues in the just over 24 hours since the move was made. As one wag suggested on Twitter, “even www.istwitterdown.com can’t keep up.”
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Verio downtimes for small customers was what I heard but never expected downtimes at The Twitter level.
As being Twitter, if you can not even trust Verio, who can you trust then?
This is a problem with datacenters in general, after some size, I believe.
Geeze…Duncan.
Will you ever quit this hidden behavior. ” greater love for Larry and Sergey”
If you really like someone. No one is stopping you. Just go for it already. Work it slowly. Geeze. Give Mike love card or something. I don’t know…
Maybe bold head works. I think…
It meant simply that they’re not necessarily tied to Google in the bigger picture…if you read into that more that’s says more about you than me.
Looks like someone has been pirating CS3 Web Premium.
Okay. Duncan.. We don’t care if you are really really gay or want anal from Mike Arrington. It’s not our problem. Try to get back to techcrunch normal.
Okay!!! Normal article please….
That is certainly an interesting rumor. And here we all thought Twitter was about to become stable.
http://nobosh.com
things change and change is the rule of this world
Don’t really think it has much to do with Joyent… but, sigh.. (but mightbe good for them, $$$)… 8-D
I have been reading shifting tech emotion from duncan. Some anti-gay doers want to fire you. Mike never fired you.
I can see obession. I can tell you secertly love mike inside techcrunch. LOL. Funny, mike doesn’t know for years. You worked techcrunch for long time.
Duncan, any successful luck to marry michael Arrington?
If not… oh well. By the way, I’m anti-gay doer. I simply give up. I’m just fan of Techcrunch. I know you like mike.
Techcrunch rating looks great. YOu want to marry mike Go for it!!!
pls dun say bad things about Duncan. He is just doing his job.
even know I dun like some of the posts (e.g. the german case law) post that he wrote, but dun do that to him
You know, the whole Twitter thing might have been nothing, a flash in the pan, but for a couple of things that made it just a little better and pushed it over the edge:
1) The API is simple and has cultured a nice little developer ecosystem.
2) The mobile text end, and the IM integration for alerts and following
So, as a property and target for a telecom, it’s a great idea to leverage a few other means to grow text messaging.
If NTT really is the buyer, hey, smooth move..
Fred Wilson has been awfully quiet lately…they (Twitter) are all his fault, no?
What’s the news? Telcos invest in several companies? So?
Twitter still remains junk. It will be a huge mistake made by JPN Y.
twitter down is a big issue?
Q: You’re totally right, Asians totally hate short messaging.
Hey Amateur, fix the typo in your title!
somebody needs to write a comment pertinence plugin so we don’t have to read the blathering idiot in #2, #5, and #9.
He watches gays on ustream too!
Duncan this ’story’ sucks…
@14
Hey Asians love short messages…
Is Twitter still a Rails app? Maybe they should move over to EngineYard?
I think that will be the last time I read the comments in TechCrunch for a while. This place is all class.
Twitter is performing fine absolutely. Its all fine
off topic but,
“Bloomberg The First Word” is reporting Microsoft buying Yahoo at $31 a share. It was just on Bloomberg radio.
Russian trolls say the darndest things.
Wow — just wow — we’ve had NO END of trouble with Verio. They’re now my second choice in ISPs — after ANYONE ELSE!
When I go to Twitter the files are being served via Amazon AWS…
Twitter down and the world goes on. No one outside the 415 cares about Twitter. Even people in the 650 have moved on.
Last night’s outage was a fat-fingered mistake by myself after far too many hours awake, nothing more, nothing less. We’re still working out a few kinks that are expected as part of a migration from Solaris to Linux, but hope to be done by the end of the day.
That’s alright. Ev loves Japanese. HE married one. http://www.flickr.com/photos/e.....408987916/
I can see obession. I can tell you secertly love mike inside techcrunch. LOL. Funny, mike doesn’t know for years. You worked techcrunch for long time.
@26
I used to agree, but they’ve got funding - and they don’t seem to be disappearing anywhere in our near future….
Twitter is on an NTT IP block. Hopefully NTT won’t get as badly burned on a Twitter deal as they did on the Verio deal. $6 billion, ouch.
thank you