Back in the heady, sunlit uplands of Summer 2007 we used to complain when Twitter went down, so useful had it become. Even Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis once decided Twitter was so crucial to his business that he would pay $100 a year for a premium account. Well, as we all now know, a few people cottoned on to that idea, and so Yammer was born to bring the usefulness of Twitter to internal company communications. It even won the TechCrunch 50 top prize. But today Yammer (at least as of this moment, 2 a.m. PDT in Europe) is down, and even TechCrunch staff, who use it internally, have now gone silent. But the rot has not just set in at this humble blog. The UK’s BBC, which employs 25,000 people, has been trying out Yammer too. If you think Twitter being down was annoying – try taking out your internal company communications.
Update: As of 6.30 a.m. PDT it was still down in Europe, but appeared to be up in the US.
Update 2: Yammer CEO David Sacks emails:
Yammer did not suffer an outage this morning. Rather a small percentage of users experienced a bug causing them to see an error page for several hours. Admittedly this is just as bad for those affected; however, it’s much less likely to be repeated than a scalability problem. (In other words, it is not an indication that we will have trouble scaling.)