When Twitter took drastic measures to try to survive a single day of heavy traffic (today’s Steve Jobs keynote at the WWDC), I said “…they may win the day. Expect silence on our end if they do, and a merciless blog post if they fail.” Some commenters thought that was unfair of me, though, and in a weak moment I subsequently promised to give Twitter a golf clap it they made it through the day without an outage.
Well, they made it, and I applaud them. To be fair, they did have some minor downtime (minor by Twitter standards) - 4% of requests failed. But it was close enough to call it win, and I hereby give them their due.
Twitter failed to fail, and I am a happy user today.
and I have to hand it to those guys - they are the only service I know of where users rejoice when they simply manage to keep their service live.
Comments
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Yeah! Twitter!
It made FriendFeed much more fun today! Damn the stuff was POURING in there during the keynote.
Twitter was up during keynote - TechCrunch was not. Couldn’t reach TC’s front page for approximately 10 mins yesterday.
I was away from home, watching EURO 2008 soccer games, so following MacRumors on Twitter over SMS was the only, and the perfect way for me to keep up with the news. I didn’t miss any of the features that were disabled, so for me it was an appropriate way to handle things.
Cool you made it Twitter! But seriously, I was close to buy one of this shirts: http://weconomy.spreadshirt.net
twitter even survived the massive attack on the Smibs phone http://tinyurl.com/3ze2hu
I pull my hat. p.
Migger - yeah, and we haven’t raised $20 million in venture capital, either. I’m sorry, if the gold standard of internet uptime for heavily funded startups is TechCrunch, they’re in trouble. We’re a blog. I run my business from my living room.
You fail as a reader and are hereby banned.
Wow, $20 million, that sure are three very expensive servers they got there.
Michael - Rather than being a direct comparison (which would be unfair, as you pointed out), I took Migger’s comment to be more of a rocks / glass houses thing.
Please tell me you didn’t really ban him. Because the irony of TC going down on a day Twitter didn’t certainly wasn’t lost on me, either. I *almost* considered tweeting it, in fact.
It’s all silly anyway, because macrumorslive is all anyone really needs.
Congrats to Twitter, but their downtime is still pretty ridiculous.
Definitely congratulations to Twitter.
Next milestone? One week of uptime?
Justin, yes, I really banned him. you’re now banned too.
@Justin - good thing you caught the irony. Looking back I guess I could have thrown in a smiley there just to underline it.
Tell me that the ban was a joke! He was telling the truth, there were two times I couldn’t view Techcrunch–hey, we were looking at it and constantly refreshing–so you shouldn’t ban him from stating that.
As for Twitter, the only problem I had him was immediately after the Jobs talk ended. I assume the attendees pulled their cell phones out and tweeted away.
damnit Migger, you’ve been banned. you can’t come here any more.
you too Liz. you’re gone.
(do any of you people realize I can’t actually ban you from reading techcrunch?)
@Migger - Indeed. Damn typed-out blog comments and their ambiguity.
Couldn’t live without TC. Downtime or not. I accept my ban - as long as I get to decide when in function
Migger & Justin - you guys should start a blog together, or something.
What about me ?
Migger -
Yes, Peter, you can be banned too.
am I gone 2 ?
@ #17 - I just assumed this was another example of Matt Harrington letting all his success with The Crunch.com go to his head.
ahhh man, I screwed up. I guess I’ll never make it on TC…
Justin - I refuse to be referred to as “#17.”
ok people, carry on with the craziness. I’m off to write about bebo, or apple, or something. maybe facebook.
@Justin There another violation: double banned
Michael: You could ban them if you just add an iptables rule to disregard all requests coming from their IP.
Ban me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111oneoneeleven111!!
*sarcasm overload*
Mike, please ban me too.
Keep that golfclap on the back-burner, your post is slightly wrong - twitter did get taken down by heavy traffic. It was unresponsive for several minutes during the keynote, completely unable to handle the load. I took a screenshot. http://www.m-i-x.com/?p=43
Fact:- Twitter can’t cope with keynote traffic after previous failures, months of preperation and investment, so how on earth will it cope when a real global news event happens? Maybe it’s time for a major network player to take over.
Eric - well, that would certainly ban their IP address, but i’m not so sure it would ban the person. and, really, that’s not the point here.
So how long until this site is rebranded as twittertrollcrunch.com? Am I the only one who doesn’t use twitter, doesn’t care about the mutinae of their uptime problems, and doesn’t see the need in their every stumble, success and blog post being documented on TC? But hey, it’s your site to run how you want…
how about banning an entire IP range? Canadians maybe… just kidding.
Maybe the bannings are TC’s way of dealing with the downtime. By banning their most loyal readers, TC can cut traffic in HALF (or maybe even more!). Think about what this would do to TC’s uptime. It’s brilliant!
Plus, all it would do is create more TC demand. Think about it. It’s like Furby, or Tickle Me Elmo. Supply vs. demand. It’s simple economics, people.
calm down justin. it’s going to be ok.
It’s all my fault. Yet Arrington didn’t ban me. Sob.
TechCrunch should start turning off features
@Justin ahhh so this is a twitter / TC race on how to minimize supply while maximizing demand. Incredible.
Exactly. I think we’ve uncovered something key here. I think we better watch our step, or else the real banhammer will fall to ensure our silence.
#42 ahem @Justin agreed, we’re living pretty close to the edge here. I am sure ME is secretly working with #30 on new technologies to tip us off. I better go to bed before I do any more damage.
Tsk tsk. Poor banned readers… Time to use a proxy?
I think we may be getting a little off topic here. The point should be that Twitter has been working hard to pull there service together and it is starting to show. It was never design to handle the load that is being put on it. They have been working on trying to make it capable of handling the enormous load placed on it every day, and they are slowly succeeding.
I agree that they have real problems, but I think they are making a real effort to fix them. This can be seen through ther uptime during Steves speech.
Lets put ourselves in there shoes for a minute and not be quite so hasty to judge.
Migger, Justin and other banned users. You need to start a blog together and ban Michael from your blog.
Forrest - my guess is you’re a Flip user.
Not really. Actually I’m with Peter at http://www.smibs.com. We went into private beta so we are alreay pretty exited over here…. Are you a flip user?
Forrest - no (see my coverage), but you seem particularly susceptible to marketing messages. My title of this post was chosen deliberately. There is no excuse for Twitter’s performance issues over the last two years.
What can I say A few beers makes me a sucker. As I said, we are celerating our release tonight. (shameless plug.. http://www.smibs.com).
I do think that you may be being too hard on Twitter. Hind sight is 20×20 and their platform was never developed with this load in mind.
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