Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, again. Yes, they’re looking into it. Yes, this is another Twitter post. But, I come bearing gifts. Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.
“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.
Update: And after about an hour of downtime, they’re back.
Update 2: Twitter has blamed the downtime on a “fatal software error.” Despite saying it’s now fixed, the service is down again.
Update 3: It’s kind of up again, sort of, maybe. Might I suggest a list of alternative things to do once again?
Wow, $55 MILLION in funding and they can’t take a little JavaScript worm?
And the crowd chants: “OVERRATED, OVERRATED”
Trust me Kramer. A lot of people would want to be in Twitters position.
Internet is the only “industry” where the biggest names are those that have no business model..
…and receive rave reviews while losing their investors cold hard cash quarter after quarter with no sign of profitability in the near future.
It seems that the dot com days are here again…
lol well that’s true, but I think they do have a business model but they just haven’t realized it yet.
Like me for example!
I agree Twittter get’s way too much attention on TC, but they momentum and a great brand.
they are overrated
Yeah, It’s amazing, you can’t get enough of those down times!
http://www.twibeo.com
The FF and Twitter Combo.
hey… the competition is talking…
@Stark,
Why of Twibeo’s admins keeps deleting posts? Your site stole the theme and tagline from Twitter, stole logo from HootSuite. And, site’s admin silently deleted them, when somebody said that in your site.
I reeeaaaally wanted to tweet about Twitter being down. Symptons of an addiction..
Somebody assassinated Twitter.
As Twitter grows, worms will grow too.
Twitter team should create a tough defensive system or we will see more attacts like this in the future.
Twitter should definitely be more proactive than reactive to these types of crashes. Have you seen the number of companies that plan to launch Twitter strategies in the next year? Setting aside how I feel about this, Twitter won’t be the go-to network for businesses if this keeps up. It also won’t be quite so fun for addicts like myself. Someone who can stay ahead of these crashes can totally blow Twitter out of the water.
and now if you go to http://playspymaster.com they are reporting on being “jammed” – so something else is going on as well, I suspect Twitter is only kinda back may have API issues ongoing?
Yeah looks that way Shannon. Thanks.
Can someone please tell me what Oprah has been doing. I’m lost without her tweets.
I for one thank the mighty whale for the respite from assassinations.
All praise the whale.
still down for me
It just went back down, after they updated that it was up, naturally.
Hey MG,
Is the API side still down? I also can not log in as well.
Ironically, I can tweet from Friendfeed (lots of irony here) but all my Twitter apps don’t work.
Lol, I was wondering because I was just on it.
Cmon Siegler, atleast a word of thanks would have been nice, considering I tipped TC about the downtime
(Ref to comment on Leena’s last post about twitter) 
Cheers
S+
I hope you’re kidding, but if not, I technically tipped myself over an hour ago http://friendfe...gling-right-now
Fcourse! I know you spend way more time on Twitter than I do
Wait, so these gaming pioneers don’t exist except on another team’s back? At all? o.O
Well… sort of.
Whenever you do anything on Spymaster, it has the ability to send a notification to twitter. So when you attempt an action, it presumably makes a call to the Twitter API, regardless of whether or not you have those notifications enabled.
I noticed that before it was jammed, and twitter was down that it was taking quite a bit of time to respond. I can only assume that the lag was due to waiting for twitter to timeout, then continuing on with that action.
It’s sad and funny at the same time. It’s almost as if the whole world knew about Twitter phenomenon except for the folks running Twitter. They should have anticipated this and put some proactive measures in play so their platform is protected and supported for all its users…this is going to hit against their brand. Wonder if there are any second advantage movers who are looking to learn from the lessons of Twitter and take over?
Facebook?
Cindy are you really that clueless? This is standard operating procedure.
How am I going to run Drunksblog.com without Twitter!? SHIT.
upgrade twitter using oAuth, then u won’t have stupid problems like this. that’s wat i did and it works fine
Funny this game acts and looks like s disguise of (S)pyramid scheme…
Hmmmmm…
Interesting Spymaster related note:
If you ask Blip.FM to turn off the annoying direct messages that users can send you asking to join, they have an easy way to contact them and can stop it.
There is, at least as far as I can tell, no way to stop the annoying spymaster-related direct messages. I don’t mind the game, I think it’s fun and there’s nothing wrong with that, but there has to be an opt-out of some kind to put a stop to the spam (which in turn, probably taxes Twitter’s system and causes stuff like the fail whale to happen).
another service will come along to handle the social games
I’ve got something i could suggest you could do with your time… be productive..
That spy game seems no better than than the Twitter ‘worm’ TC reported on earlier. Very spammy. And now that I linked my account, I’m not sure how to unlink it. Though I know how to block anyone I follow that tweets about it.
For those looking to unlink Spymaster: From the Twitter webpage, click Settings, click the Connections tab, and then ‘revoke’ Spymaster. oAuth works!
You sir are a god!
I’m going to retweet this.
Can someone explain the “$55m” funding for Twitter? There’s nothing to it. A server farm with a few simple pages that allow people to update them with a few lines of text. It isn’t rocket science. WHy do these idiots keep getting so much funding for the simplest web based ideas? They’re not designing the next Google. They’re not even designing the next Digg. There’s no purpose for that much investment when a few hundred bucks could do the same thing. Are VCs really this stupid?
yes.
Are VC’s really this stupid? Go to the TechCrunch Deadpool and see for yourself. But hey, at least they’re redistributing their income and keeping a bunch of Mountain Dew addicts in the Bay Area gainfully employed.
You can’t think of Twitter pages as blogs. Twitter is a message deliver service. When a user tweets, their message has to be delivered to all their followers. When someone like Ashton Kutcher tweets it’s like he’s sending an email/im to 2 million people with the expectation that it will arrive to all 2 million instantaneously. Most Twitter users don’t have a million followers but all those users with a couple 100 followers or a couple 1000 followers all tweeting at the same time adds up to a huge amount of messages that have to be delivered every second.
on the grand scale, it sounds expensive. How do they pay for it? (Other than raising VC funds)
can we say… Deadpool.
@no: Seriously? You really think there’s nothing to Twitter?
Great. Get out there, build your own, and beat ‘em. You could be the one getting $55m in funding, since the people with the money are such morons.
Maybe if you actually looked into what they do and how it’s done, you’ll learn something. I’d especially focus on the real-time search stuff and delivering all of Scoble’s tweets. Ashton Kutcher might be a too advanced for you out of the gate.
status.twitter.com. IN CNAME http://www.techcrunch.com.
+1,000,000
I’m now following you so i can keep up with what’s happening on Twitter. I think we’ll feature you on Twitter Talk on next weeks show http://budurl.com/1OneShot Any idea how many times you typed the word TWITTER? That could be useful information. Last week Sockington, This week Kathy Ireland, next week ????
What a joke. Parallel architecture on Infiniband is the only solution.
Wake up and smell the coffee.
Traditional web strategies for scalability don’t work on Twitter — it’s near impossible.
if it hasn’t been said yet … “baring gifts” ??? should be “bearing gifts”. thanks ~ 4th grade english teacher.
Yep typo, fixed, thanks.
thats what happens when a TWIT spends all his time on twitter….
all this talk about twitter funding what about fadbook.
fadbook is becoming the reality telenovela of social networking. a fancy white pages phonebook, with a bunch of tricks and treats. is anyone going their to do business, promote themselves or get paid.
the ultimate social network that helps people and companies improve efficiency will win the social media and search engine wars.
MasterLocator.com – ultimate leaders
you click that SPYMASTER link in the article… shows them being ‘In Beta’ … yeah, Beta Fail!
Get off Twitter until you can do it without
1) Crashing Twitter
2) Annoying the F*ck out of 90% of the Twitter Populace.
It’s “bearing” gifts.
I have many people complaining that the site is suspending accounts for no apparent reason…anyone know the reason why.
Fail Whale, you’re the best we’ve got…
I don’t understand it; why don’t twitter start the service from scratch? I mean, why don’t they take half their engineers and start building twitter again from scratch, with what they know now – about how the service is used – they could quite easily improve it.
Most of their problems appear to be that during early development they never expected it to scale to this size, so they’re constantly overloading their unsuitable software and hardware.
Can anyone explain why they don’t do this? Twitter is ever so simple in nature, I honestly can’t see why it isn’t a possibility that they take half their engineers, give them a week to develop an entirely new, more efficient system, test it extensively and then launch it, it seems like a drastic measure but done right it’ll solve almost all their downtime problems.
In my opinion, anyway.
TechCrunch is a pubescent boy and Twitter is Scarlett Johanson
i suggest a site wide search and replace, “twitter” —> “quiver”. techcrunch could double as a dime store romance novel
http://is.gd/KHkZ
I keep trying to take you down MG, no luck.
and i was just about to finish assassinating and finally discover the secrets within spymaster — http://web-poet...5/31/spymaster/
OMgosh no way, Tweet is down? I thin kthe world is going to stop revolving!
RT
http://www.onli...privacy.vze.com
For all the priapic enthusiasm of the “Twitter will revolutionize business!!!” crowd, no one is addressing the dangers to companies and brands:
http://www.lohad.com/?p=3489
Making twitter games is easy, but spymaster has a lot of spam. For fun a few weeks ago I made a twitter battle game with a friend that does not spam your friends, check out @BattleBird.
i think Spymaster should consider integrating with identi.ca
At what point are they going to hire an experienced VP Engineering or VP Operations…this shit isn’t that complicated, unless you consider a first timer is running development and ops.
If this was any company other than twitter, TC would be talking about how the company it is an utter failure…
Probando FB C, bye.
Ever the worlds best brands sometimes have Bad moments
Dammit, my clothes have been sitting in the washer for 3 hours because the washing machine couldn’t twitter about it! I kept checking my Apple iPhone 3G for a text and I finally had to go check on it myself!
for another funny way to survive Twitter withdrawal, have a look at http://www.bast...pendingtimedie/
If you’re tired of Twitter failing move over to identi.ca and try their stuff out.
Or build your own microblog site that integrates with all the other OMB protocol based sites with the laconi.ca software.
yeah- identi.ca or a better incarnation flokio.com that even supports vid.
There is life outside of twitter.
but the author of this story “MG Siegle” A.K.A. “TWIT”, “Douche”, and “TWITTER HAG”…. Thinks that the world as we know it is changing one tweet at a time….
I wish twitter would assassinate this ridiculous game. I really don’t want to mass unfollow a bunch people but I’m going to have to soon. Many DM’s from this horrible spam game. Help.
I didn’t even know there was a twitter game. It is kind of addicting though, I like to enter a search term with # (whatever) and watch what people are saying about it. Today I just watched all the people talking about #E3. I did notice it was down yesterday but big deal. How does Twitter make money?
Looks like Twitter will be spending more time on the back end given spymaster popularity
http://hubpages...er-Twitter-Game
OMG I LOVE THAT SHOW