Twitter suffered a minor period of uptime last night between database failures. Everything seems back to normal now. Perhaps somebody returned that lost database to them.
Please, Twitter, I beg you. Bring Blaine back.
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by
Michael Arrington
on
June 6, 2008
Responses
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Lost Remote » Twitter suffers minor period of uptime overnight
June 6th, 2008 at 1:23 pm -
TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Twitterがほぼ夜通しサービス障害に見舞われる
June 6th, 2008 at 3:31 pm -
I Really Hope Twitter Isn’t Friendster 2.0 | RyanSpoon.com
June 6th, 2008 at 4:45 pm -
WinExtra » From the Pipeline – 6.6.08
June 6th, 2008 at 9:17 pm -
Webmaster Blog | Twitter - Ende einer Ära?
June 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pm -
The Twitterless Week Experiment « TechTicker
June 7th, 2008 at 3:55 am -
Geek And Poke
June 7th, 2008 at 4:20 pm -
TechCrunch en français » [fr] La TwittoSecond
June 8th, 2008 at 12:47 am -
Twitter Tempts Fate
June 8th, 2008 at 5:46 pm -
Notes for 6/8/2008 at MasterMaq’s Blog
June 8th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
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Mike I can usually tell it is you writing from the very clever titles. Workshop needed for your other writers…
Yeah, bring back the idiot that created the mess, oh the original mess, was POS 1.0 better than POS 3.0?
Get some adult supervision as well.
So now its news when twitter is up!
I thought I was reading The Onion for a second
looks like they aren’t the only one’s having trouble. amazon.com looks to be dead now.
Brilliant title!
http://www.plurk.com has been overloaded with former twitterers (sp?) in the mean time
What they need to do is hire someone to watch the servers and restart what needs to be restarted, but it doesn’t need to be Blaine. The reason their services are so unreliable and require restarts is likely the work of their former architect, and I would assume that’s why he was removed.
I’m sure it’s a bit of a cluster-f*** over there right now because there are constant fires and band-aide fixes going on while they’re trying to build the thing right in the background. Managing it is no easy task, but they could be doing a better job worrying about live site, at least that’s my opinion from the peanut gallery.
Ah, bashing twitter for being down…it never gets old. I’m hoping that the last few weeks have been a by-product of them migrating to a more robust and scalable architecture and we’ll soon see the downtime disappear for good. But who knows?
The bottom line is that twitter has clearly created a new market and who else is going to fit that niche AND be able to scale? Seems like the simplest service out there (twitter) with $15m should be able to do it if anyone can.
ROTFL! Twitter’s downtime has become a bigger news item than Twitter. Who else has a site dedicated to their uptime/downtime:
See http://www.istwitterdown.com/
What a joke!
@Michelle
Plurk has some cool features, but there’s no way they’re going to be able to scale it…it’s probably 10x more complex than Twitter.
Title of the Job
“Enterprise Clicker” like “Enterprise Architect ” [ Click that restart button ]
This was an old joke we use to have when we were having to restar the server very often.
Cheers, Nag
Why must you waffle so on Blaine Cook… You were so mean to him before…
“Mike, we live in a world that has twitter, and those twitters have to be guarded by men with code. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Mr. Dorsey? Blaine had a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom…. You have the luxury of not knowing what he knows. That Twitter’s uptime, while rare, probably saves lives. And that Blaine’s existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want him on that twitter, you need him on that twitter. “
@11: That’s a bizarre thing to say.
@Mike: I know that picking on the tech failures of twitter is fun and all but when are you going to write the piece that defines the real problem, which is that the technical / engineering failures are a symptom of a bigger problem, failed leadership. While I understand that’s a pretty big charge to make, but the buck stops with the founders / leaders, period. They are the reason the wrong engineers were hired, kept on board longer then they should have been and why ultimately, in either case (bad engineers or not) the right peole and the right plan were not implemented.
Sure they got caught off guard by the crushing success and a certain level of downtime / issues is certainly acceptable, but this has been going on for YEARS………
The true test will be when they have had time to put their new money to work…. if we are still having this convo in 2 or 3 months, no amount of money will fix the problem until there is new leadership.
I think Twitter should do a Town Hall.
http://twittertownhall.com
Is anyone else tired of the snide comments/whines about twitter downtime on this site? It seems like they’re working on it and at least we know now. For a service that’s free, you can bitch that much can you?
What do you do to Twitter? It’s been down like once since last Thursday for me. Maybe I don’t refresh every 30 seconds to masturbate to what my friend’s are up to like you do, but I like to think I’m a fairly frequent user.
Perhaps you’re overinflating your downtime woes in order to make more ad money? Nah. Couldn’t be.
Of the 6 billion people on earth, there aren’t a few who could have fixed this thing by now? We can land a robot on Mars, but not scale a social app? Really strange.
Funniest Headline of the day, love it!
TC needs a feed without all twitter related posts…
Re: Amazon outage: We’ll eventually find out it was Media Defender all along. That’ll show Amazon for opening a movie store.
As the head of a couple of startups, I find these stories about Twitter and delving into their problems actually very useful.
It’s certainly made us concentrate more on architecture etc from the start rather than just having a code-it-and-they-will-come attitude which the Twitter guys definitely seem to have had at the beginning.
Have a great w/end everyone.
I think istwitterdown.com needs its own. isistwitterdowndown.com
I hope it has a design aesthetic along these lines:
http://isittheweekend.netscrap.com
http://www.isitchristmas.com
CG
(tweeting just fine on facebook right now, thanks)
Man… just getting worse over time: http://www.pingdom.com/reports.....com%2Fhome
Bring Blaine Back, ha ha! What is this, “John McCain Emulation Day?”
Twitter is Down! Atleast thats what their home page says. we will be back in 30 minutes.. duh!!
I think Arrington was being sarcastic with his “bring Blaine back” comment, but he has inadvertently raised a very good point: the leadership at Twitter should have never let go of Cook until his replacement(s) had already come in and solved Twitter’s scaling and stability issues.
As it stands right now they’ve only magnified the problem with no solution in sight.
Also: Plurk. Plurk Plurk Plurk. Plurka Plurka?
(I can’t stop saying it. It sounds so funny.)
@Trace. We have a winner! I wonder what the investors think about the community goodwill being pissed down the drain.
I keep waiting for TechCrunch to get back to its original goal and focus of writing good articles about startups, but every time I see another “Bad Twitter Bad!” article my opinion of the site gets lowered another notch. This obsession Arrington has regarding Twitter’s uptime and problems is getting out of hand.
At least I can still get my fill of good reporting and articles over at GigaOm.
As a reminder, here’s a feed for TechCrunch that doesn’t include Michael Arrington’s hate:
http://icanhaz.com/tcsansarrington
Who are the bigger fools, the Twitter developers or the users who stick with them?
Did Amazon acquire Twitter? Amazon is experiencing the same downtime issues…blah!
@33. Neither. Its the investors who feed the problem.
@34. You just connected the dots. Twitter must be using Amazon’s SimpleDB database!
Best. Title. Evar.
i’m sure if it was easy they would have hired some dude to press a button when the magic light turns red.
Oh Twitter. You abuse me so but I keep coming back for more. I have dependency issues.
Another stupid post from Arrington about twitter and I am unsubscribing from techcrunch.
The fact remains that whether you agree with Arrington or not (which I do) - he’s 100% right. $15 million dollars and the board they have should be able to somewhat predict, plan for and for god sakes SOLVE scaling issues. I mean, they are leaving the door WIDE open for Plurk, and users that only had half a leg in the door, are leaving and not making the commitment, or maybe becoming “addicted” is a better word choice. Either way, it’s just bad business. And at the core of his argument, is what Arrington said.
Blaine Cook is an amazing architect, but I bet even he would admit some fault. And isn’t that all Michael’s original post stated?
LOL - Blaine has 1 hell of a following out there…he should start a fan club on Facebook!
@21
Here is the TC feed with out twitter awesomeness
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/p.....render=rss
In related news, “Arrington stressing that there will be nothing else to talk about…. ever.”
@19. I’m sure someone can fix their issues. The question is: Why would they want to? Of the 6billion people on earth, “fixing Twitter” will impact virtually no one.
Mike, you should really get over it. Leave Twitter; use something else. Stop bitching.
Here is the TC feed with out twitter awesomeness
What i see from this slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter/
It seems like this guy didnt even know, that you can’t use a relational database(MySQL) properly without indexing.
If he did learn this lession on slide 22 after he went live… No comment…
In my opinion 30 tomcats with some apaches as load-balancer with a oracle real application cluster will do this job without ever having trouble with them.
Twitter is not “up” until all services are working, which includes IM, following and tracking. IM has been down for what, two weeks now?
Come on, also Amazon has a down about 1 hour:
http://twitturly.com/urlinfo/u.....0454a3f9a/
Good points, but make it more generally