We all know about Twitter’s downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back — but only partially. Over the past hour since it’s been back, it’s been up and down, but mostly down. And now there’s another problem, FriendFeed is down too.
FriendFeed, aka, the first alternative to talk about Twitter when Twitter is down, has completely lost contact with its data center, co-founder Bret Taylor tells me (hey, Twitter once lost a database, so this is nothing new). They’re investigating the problem right now. But where are we supposed to turn? Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Scoble must being going crazy right now.
It was probably only a matter of time before Twitter, which has a long history of downtime, was down on the same day as another site that houses people’s social graphs. When one of these sites goes down, people can usually deal with it. But two? I think I hear people screaming outside of my window. If Gmail goes down right now, I’m packing up some bottled water and heading for the hills. (With my iPhone just in case they all come back up in time.)
Update: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit lets everyone know (appropriately on Twitter), “The entire svcolo datacenter lost power. They expect to have it restored in 10min, but it will take at bit to bring up all systems.”
Update 2: The downtime has now surpassed an hour. Here’s what Buchheit tells me, “Our entire datacenter lost power, and unfortunately it’s taking them a while to restore it.” He also noted that FriendFeed isn’t the only one affected, check out more of the carnage via this Twitter search.
well there is always pownce
Stop wining about Twitter. Nobody cares.
Exactly. Nobody uses that crap and nobody cares if it’s down. Give it a rest already.
“Nobody uses that crap and nobody cares if it’s down. Give it a rest already.” I completely don’t agree
I think Twitter should only be paid for the time it’s up, just like other professions.
I hate blogs about Twitter. Give us a break ,please. Will you?
Another post about Twitter….
Time to unsubscribe Techcrunch.
Funny, I was just praising Friendfeed to Walt Mossberg telling him “it never goes down.” I jinxed it. Sorry about that friendfeeders. “Blame Scoble.”
Anyway, I can’t get to either Twitter or friendfeed. At least there’s TechCrunch! Whew.
Bob,
Of course Twitter & friendfeed (ff) being down is your fault. Right up there with the SF earthquake, & the over sized pit in an Avocado.
D
P.S. How’s it in HMB?
Don’t tell me it’s not relevant. If you’re such a big deal, you shouldn’t have to moonlight at the old gig.
ha ha, I liked pownce, but my order goes like this
No twitter ? I’d Go to Facebook or Friendfeed or one of the other millions of meeting points online like Ning or Mybloglog
FYI edit copy – it should read “Scoble must be going crazy now,” rather then most
cheers
That is the reason why we have built WallPipe (www.wallpipe.com) on Google App Engine. And as many of you know Google App Engine is reliable and doesn’t go down when really needed. We wish we had launched it today. It would have been great. But never mind, we are launching Monday and we know twitter will still be down.
That’s why we built f2bbs.com and it’s launched today. Totally kicks your ass by the way, since it’s already live and doesn’t wait for monday and doesn’t go down like twitter.
Are you serious “F2 E-Business News”???
)
LOL…. hahahha…. my stomach hurts right now …
Have you seen your website yourself??? And this is how you want to compete with twitter?? or even WallPipe???
I know everyone has this germ called “entrepreneurship” in them … but seriously … you should consult a doctor and get it out…. hahahha…
Good Luck!!
You’re both dongs – that’s why we built superfuckingawesome.net
It went live in 1968 and has never gone down, ever. It actually almost caused the singularity in 1987 but we forced it to read the complete works of Ayn Rand and it decided that consciousness wasn’t worth it.
@Gak, yeah, and we one-upp’d you with ubersuperfrackingawesomekickyourassgoogolplexidian.ru. As the name says, we’ll kick your ass.
Good job MG. for trashing Techcrunch. By the way, how much do you get paid by Twitter?
i get paid in uptime.
Has anyone heard from Scoble since this travesty occured?
No. He went outside for the first time in years and appears to be lost in the backyard. A search party has been dispatched. But without access to his friend feed they have no way to track him.
Everyone is just praying Twitter comes back up so Robert can come back inside.
I’m at the Kinnernet conference and we’re having dinner. I thought I’d sign on to do some demos and thought I was hacked. Very fun. Plus I left my iPhone in the taxi cab (that’s coming back to me too). Sigh.
Glad to have you back Robert! I knew you could make it without Twitter and FriendFeed!
Not your day huh?
Nice to hear you’re okay though!
Not friendfeed’s day. I was sitting in between Jimmy Wales and Walt Mossberg when friendfeed went down. You can blame me for jinxing friendfeed. Maybe someone pulled the plug because they didn’t want it to get overhyped and have all the celebrities move from Twitter to friendfeed.
Or you can just say ‘blame Scoble.’
Actualy I’ll blame the full moon that’s shining through my “office” window (2.50am here, night shift …)
Is there a tech blog that doesn’t talk about Twitter 80% of the time?
Please let me know.
Yeah, i would like to know too. TechCrunch fails me.
Go to readwriteweb.com
They have about 70% Twitter post (slightly better than Techcrunch)
There are a lot that don’t talk about Twitter most of the time, but it’s so big right now that all of them are going to have at least a few posts. I don’t know that I want to name them here (don’t want to offend anyone) but I subscribe to a couple that only talk about it when something is really going on.
No-one forced you guys to read this post. If twitter stories bore you, but you still read it and then commented…who’s the one with issues?
im going insane i must say. i need my twitter!
i am crying in laughter
Lol, the post was also about friend feed
but folks just gloss over that fact 
Technorati search is down too. Oh. You’re saying I’m the only one who noticed?
You’re the only one who noticed.
Wow still down… I really wanted to read some twats
Seems like both twitter and friendfeed are still down. It is 6:24 pm in houston and past midnight in Nigeria. Almost midnight in the U.K just for the records.
Today will go down in history. Gmail, Twitter and Friendfeed being down on the same day. Almost smell a conspiracy.
I think Scoble is on a plane to DC today.
Twitter and FriendFeed are down, but CitySpeek is still up (that is of course, until you all rush over and bring it down).
It’s 12.34 and they’re still down. This is what I get for going to the pub. Sorry, won’t do it again …
I never knew how much I depended on Friendfeed until today… I can deal with Twitter downtime.
It seems that I’m one of the few TechCrunch readers (other than the aforementioned Scoble) who is adversely affected by this. I guess I have to add more FriendFeed/Twitter users to my Facebook friends list.
Isn’t this the longest downtime that FriendFeed has ever had? Or have I missed a longer down period?
So what if fucking Twitter or FriendFeed has gone down.
Just open your bloody front door, take a walk and get a bleedin life!
…says a man commenting on techcrunch from his facebook account.
Go to the top of the class MA.
But if you look more closer at my comments my pedigree chum, I am talking about those pouncy sites that nearly always go down quicker than Britney Spears.
TC and Facebook are the pillars of the web community.
You don’t need bleedin Nostradamus to tell you that Twitter will go down again before the end of the year.
I like when TC writes about twitter because I find the whining hilarious and entertaining.
As do I.
Dear folks whining about how much TechCrunch (and other blogs) write about Twitter. What would you rather them right about? What’s hot right now? What’s really really innovative and interesting? Hmm?
not “rather”, but there are plenty of interesting companies out there. Hang out at some of the entrepreneurial events & find lots of them. Including ours!
1 hour is a long 10 mins
Especialy if you have to go to the toilet.
How can svcolo lose power? Shouldn’t they have double-triple redundancy in their power systems? So much for that.
Friendfeed and Twitter is not all life. Dear folk come in to the real world…
I guess there is always TechCrunch…
What a big shame. Total funding seems to be $60 M $ (55 + 5) but they can’t direct the money I think. :p
They are life streams so they must have % 100 uptime. It’s totally right, “Today will go down in history.”
Thank goodness PornHub stayed up.
Hehe, “stayed up”. >.>
imagine a world without twitter!
uh.. so what changed?
http://www.generac.com/
Problem prevented.
OK, guys, let’s talk about life.
I dont care much about Twitter. But I care about Friendfeed because Friendfeed is much better. By the way, I discovered Friendfeed through Scoble. Hy, Scoble, your writting is very funn and informative.
Sorry my Eglish. I am portuguese.
On his day’s off my Portuguese chum, Scobie also does abit of acting.
Particularly Boogie Nights, MI3 and his Oscar winning role in Capote.
as usual, MG gives great head[line].
Twitter is like a hot girl that everybody talks about
Thats right UC.
And just like Twitter that hot girl goes down at least once a week