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.