Everyone’s always raving about the huge popularity of Twitter given its limited feature set. After all, the service lets people share whatever they’re doing, eating, listening to, reading, etc. in 140 characters, and that’s basically the gist of it. Of course, we’ve learned that it can be extremely powerful for a variety of reasons, like enabling people to keep up with your friends’ social activities without cluttering your e-mail inbox or Facebook account, for instant news, real-time search, etc.
But some time ago, about two hours at the time of this writing, the constant waterfall of Twitter messages has abruptly stopped updating. Status update messages are simply no longer being published, neither on the Twitter home page or through any of the third-party clients, and even Twitter search no longer crawls for recent messages, as you can tell from the screenshot below. The basic functionality of Twitter is still there though, so you can still update your own stream, but the conversation has ended. All you can do is go to individual profile pages for people you’re following and take a look at what they’re tweeting about, but that’s it.
Suddenly, Twitter feels like a pretty lonely place for people to hang out, and complaining about the problems on the service itself feel kinda stupid.
The Twitter team is based in the U.S., where it’s now the middle of Friday night, so there’s no way of knowing how long it will take before the issue is resolved. Twitter Status remains silent on the problem so far, but to the best of my knowledge no messages seem to have gotten lost. Thank God.
We’ll update as soon as the Twitter train starts rolling again.
Update: messages seem to be trickling in again, but with a lag.
Update 2: should be back now. Lucky for Twitter this happened on a weekend during the night (at least U.S. time) so most users won’t have even noticed. But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.
Now that’s real time journalism!
More like real-time blogging, but yes
Good to see you doing the realtime action Robin!
Too bad for us since we from India are facing the aftermath of yet another Fail-whale (I thought the word has become extinct) and that too in the middle of the saturday afternoon and as usual twitter never fails me!
—
Sampad
why you care to reply for him
But really a weird step from twitter..
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
I can’t tell if I think the story wasn’t newsworthy, or if I’m just here to flirt dorkishly with Robin Wauters.
Now I find Robin is male. http://twitter....om/robinwauters
This story is total junk filler.
funny
You scared me there for a second. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but …
you’re gay no going back now.
TC should stop covering all this Twitter bullshit.
It seems unimaginable that they don’t have someone on call 24/7 monitoring the site and if there are issues updating the status site. What is the point of having a status site if its not up to date with what is happening.
Hi Luke,
I understand your frustration but currently they don’t have much people right now in their team and each are probably working on something right now.
Problem got fixed though.
Luke — being a sys admin myself, I’m sure they do have an on-call rotation and someone is monitoring things 24×7. But just because something is being monitored 24×7, that doesn’t mean that if something breaks you’re going to have an instant fix for it. You’re just aware of the issue.
Believe me, I’m pretty good at what I do for a living, but there are always situations in which the answer eludes even the best of us for a short while. My guess is that’s what happened.
Seems to have just started working properly again. I sure hope so, that was strange!
Can anyone verify this besides Robin from TC?
I’ve had some late-night-Friday-blogging bite me in the ass before
It’s early Saturday here in Europe, but the issue is resolved now so you can see the complaints from Twitter users again using search: http://search.t...=twitter+update
Is twitter testing waters on it way to a different business model?
Man, what worse thing could happen, other than data loss… I was in mid conversation and it died, man.
I thought it was just Tweetdeck messing, but to not see the friends timeline updating on twitter.com itself was just pain freaky.
They’re not yet properly back for me, in case you’re wondering.
Cheers,
-Alister
—
Alister Cameron // Blogologist
http://www.alistercameron.com
Mob. 04 0404 5555
Fax 03 8610 0050
Click here to find me online:
http://clicktoadd.me/alicam
Seems to be working now… Following the Wales Vs Ireland rugby match…
http://tweetzi....m/q.php?q=Wales
Press [PLAY >] to watch the real-time tweet stream…
It was definitely down for a couple of hours, yeah. I think I actually beat Techcrunch to the punch* with an update on my blog. Not that the same numbers of people would have seen it. But still, journalistic pride, and all that.
What was slightly odd/poor is that two hours is quite a long period of time, but there wasn’t anything updated in the Twitter status page. That’s more than a bit rubbish.
* I’m registering that as a catchphrase right now.
Wondering whether the outage was a global event. And also wondering why the Queensland Election in Australia #QldElection09 was number 1 trend on twitter. Could it be that the US tweeters were locked out for a while?
Cheers
Armin
http://jtribe.com.au
I’ve noticed that some of my updates are coming through, just very late (an hour or two). Does make trying to have a conversation on there near impossible!
Thank godness. Everything is back. It’s really lonely and unbearable for the past two hours……No tweets are lost, maybe
looks to me like you have bigger problems than twitter failure mate! (kidding)
That was weird, spooky even. No fail whale just my tweets updating. Very post apocalyptic feel to the whole thing.
Nicola
Nice post! Also check out my blog/podcast at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
A shame indeed for some of us.
Twitter went down during the count of votes for our state election here in Australia, just as lots of folks were tweeting and pushing the election hashtag #qldelection09 up to the top of the Trending Topics list. Frustrating that Twitter seized up just when there was a great stream of information coming in via this hashtag. *sigh*
I could only think to myself that Twitter is a free service, after all, so are we entitled to expect more? No updates to the Twitter Status blog or anywhere else for that matter from the Twitter folk is really not good enough, though, for a service that has well over 6 million worldwide users.
“But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.”
We do this all of the time though…if you use Google or Wordpress.
I’d like to pay for Twitter. Just charge me like I pay for a domain name.
Paid services go down too. What about the mountain of money we’re paying Amazon for S3 and they still had extended downtimes last year.
Twitter failing to publish for 2 hours doesn’t “show how dangerous” anything is except maybe basing your sense of well-being on the flawless performance of Internet applications.
The only way paying makes a difference is if having a reason to yell at someone makes you feel better.
Sorry, but what do you mean, most users? You are aware that there is a world OUTSIDE of the USA don’t you?
Well said.
Apparently not since it has not been updated yet.
@Robin: Just so you know, the Internet population is about 600 million more than the population of the entire US.
Or maybe most Twitter users are based in the US.
Most users = majority of users = larger percentage of users. Glad to be of service.
@Robin – If you read carefully “The Nigerian” comment, you will realize that “Oo The nigerian,” “Ubewe.” “Smart Babes Are Sexy Blog” and “Anjali Sen, From India” although from different IPs and fake email addresses, are *the same* spammer…
Wow, that sounds like an inferiority complex. Don’t worry, we’ll continue to let you use the Internet.
If Twitter gets so huge that it runs into problems like this the idea may be to decentralize things. Maybe doing something like Yammer but for smaller “groups”.
I disagree Jason. I think the whole point of Twitter is to socialize (around the world) and not to limit it to small groups.
While it would be cool to tweet in groups, I still think Twitter is great how it is right now.
(My opinion)
I agree with facebook User. Sadly it sounds like the author believes the world revolves around America. Yes down for everyone not just the sleepy heads in good old US of A.
Yeah I’m European.
Being a casual user of Twitter I genuinely figured that I’d either unwittingly alienated myself or it was a quite time (as you mention, the US was switched off while this occurred).
However for the hard core Twitter proles, hopefully this burnout may have furnished them with the opportunity to grab some fresh air, or at the very least, look out a real window at that great (real) world we live in.
“Of course, we’ve learned that it can be extremely powerful for a variety of reasons, like enabling people to keep up with your friends’ social activities without cluttering your e-mail inbox”…”But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.”
If telling your friends what you’re eating for dinner or watching on TV is “important communication”, you’ve pretty much lost touch with reality. What EXACTLY are you doing with Twitter that’s so critical? Please enlighten us.
Joe, you don’t get to decide what’s important communication, individual users can do that for themselves.
Robin, where do you get off blasting Joe for his question? Personally I too would like to know what people are tweeting about that’s so critical that a 2 hour outage is cause for concern.
Joe may not get to decide what’s important communication and what’s not but he has the right to ask a question; regardless of the snark.
I wasn’t trying to be snarky, honestly, just wanted to point out that what’s important to one user may be meaningless for another user, but that doesn’t make it any less important for that person.
Did you miss the first part of the article that I quoted? I didn’t see anything mentioned that was life-critical about Twitter other than “enabling people to keep up with your friends’ social activities”.
Yeah, snarkiness aside, there are more reliable and trusted real-time protocols out there, and those should be used for critical messages. Most others have pointed out that crusty old telephone thing that people used to use.
When twitter went down, it was crazy. I picked up the phone and called a friend, and guess what, it worked! I heard their voice and everything!! Then I hung up and turned to my wife and spoke real words, and our conversation led to dinner and a movie. What a crazy night it was without Twitter.
Looser
that was awesome, but if you twittered that you could’ve saved yourself a character by spelling Loser correctly
My theory:
All the Battlestar Galactica & March Madness fans caused the system to overload. Simple but logical. My stream was blowing up last night and into the AM with people tweeting about BSG. Some like me tweeted every commercial break, but even non fans were tweeting about it either to complain about the mass messages about BSG or offering satire spoilers.
So say we all?
Who cares. So what that everyone won’t know what the color of your leavings were a couple of mins ago. Big deal.
I love this whole ride that biz stone is taking everyone on about twitter being a social construct and the “essence of humanity” and whatnot.
lol, he’s a great Marketeer.
“But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.”
Ha, how quaint. Michael come baaaaaack (and bitch about Twitter unreliability a little more)!
Strange, I still seem to be having some problems with TweetDeck. The stream updates, but not my groups or replies. Oh well, guess I’ll head over to Twitter on my webtop and check for updates there!
The issue is more about stuff than just updates. For example, it you try changing your background or some design feature, Twitter tells you it’s overloaded!!
It can do better!
MM
screw twitter…have you guys seen the TED talk on Sixth Sense? Bloody brilliant!
http://www.yout...h?v=nZ-VjUKAsao
Great post. Hope they figure it all out.
You mention US time. Well, there are others such as mysef!
Anyone that know the statistics? Twitter user distribution over the world?
These days Twitter is not just a fun site but it is being used for business. The marketers and bloggers use twitter to make money online and I guess twitter is something that will go much more farther than myspace, facebook or any social network sites.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
Hmm.This is the beauty of twitter. It says “Time Out” for a couple of hours and the whole world is talking about tht.And ppl use it inspite of such breakdowns.
Cool post. Makes me glad I’ve found techcrunch to stay on top of stuff like this. But …
without TIME entries, it doesn’t feel that timely. March 21 when? Updated when?
Good point, but which timezone do I pick for timestamping it? (It was between 10 and 12 AM Central European Time)
Just pick a time zone and mark which one it is – we can figure out the rest.
wow twitter was down again…
If I was working at Techcrunch I would just keep a bunch of “Twitter Is Not Working” templates for stories laying around. Complete with Two or three updates for when it’s working again.
important communication?
Please, can you make a new blog called TwitterCrunch where you post all that twitter crap. Also, can you put a disclosure about how Michael Arrington is an investor in the mos
Please, can you make a new blog called TwitterCrunch where you post all that twitter crap.
Also, can you put a disclosure about how Michael Arrington is an investor in the most popular twitter 3rd-party client. Thx
Luckily I was out for the night while twitter was not working properly, however, I did notice that over the past few days it has been very slow/buggy.
oh oh…… a rare sight
Well that didn’t take long – just yesterday I blogged that Twitter would be raked over the coals again by Techcrunch soon due to the increasing problems recently! Not the same problem this time but still.. things are afoot at Twitter these days, perhaps due to the recently added features.. or maybe it was just BSG as someone mentioned above.. (cylon attack?!
)
matt: Exactly! You know, as cheap as phone convo is these days, why anyone would rely on this for a majority of their communication is beyond me.
“But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for IMPORTANT communication.” [emphasis added]
I’m not really sure how to respond to that…
Maybe we should start with your definition of “important.” Every site is subject to downtime and I think anyone who uses the internet understands this. It’s no different than a any brick and mortar store abruptly closing unannounced for an employee meeting. It happens. And if it is to your detriment, too bad. Read the terms and conditions.
This article did not require 342 words.
“important communication”??????
WTF?
you must be kidding, right?
all you do is rely on third party apps for important communication, like phones, email (unless you own your own servers, but even then you’d be relying on the telco that provides you connection to the internets)…
but twitter as a source of “important information”?
what did you smoke?
if da twitterz torrentz are pulled down, we pirates gonna startz p2p tweeting .
icanhaztweetorrentz?
So Twitter server issues is still considered newsworthy?
These could be considered to having important information by most definitions:
http://twitter....m/wsdot_traffic
http://twitter....om/wsdot_passes
https://twitter...om/wsdot_tacoma
Twitter. It isn’t just for saying what you had for breakfast anymore.
I understand the social value of Twitter, as well as many, many users now relying on Twitter to create revenue models around Twitter and groups (I am one of them). However, as Twitter continues to grow and scale, they are going to have growing pains, and occasional outages (some of them will have to be deliberate in order to improve the system and make it better.)
In the 24/7 world, what would be the best time to bring the system down for a major improvement? Most likely, when the biggest user base (USA) is using it the least!! Unfortunately, Twitter has become a Global phenomenon, and thus people like those tweeting about AUS election were effected.
I am involved in a number of revenue models around Twitter, but as a free service, I am not going to complain when it fails from time to time like all of these whiny idiots.
I hope they continue to improve the service, and succeed in HUGE way!!!
This seems to true only for newly added followers. I am still getting updates from the ppl I used to follow. But when I added my self asa follower, i was not getting any upates from then.
Girish R
abcphp.com – Discover the best of PHP
Bad bad link spammers.
“no messages seem to have gotten lost. Thank God.”
OH NO IMAGINE IF THAT MESSAGE ABOUT WHAT YOU HAD FOR LUNCH HAD BEEN LOST!
F-ING LOSER!
Not all messages are about what people had for lunch.
With the type of weather being experienced in the mountain passes in Washington state right now, the WashDOT tweets about pass information could be a life saver.