Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”). See additional updates below.
Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning.
Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform. If they want to be the “Pulse of the Planet,” it’s time to scale.
Of course, even the largest sites still have occasional outages. Yahoo suffered 15 minutes of systemwide downtime yesterday, we’re still trying to get their comment on why that happened.
Update: LiveJournal is also down. Who else?
Update 2: Some commenters are saying Facebook is down too, although it’s up for me and others.
Update 3: Work productivity surges around the world. My electricity is still off.
Update 4: Here’s something else to do – watch this (response to this). My electricity is still off.
Update 5: Facebook is still up, but it is definitely having a lot of issues.
Update 6: LiveJournal is back up around 7:45 am Calif time. Still no electricity at my house, those jerks.
Update 7: It’s a denial of service attack. Twitter’s status update says: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” Further updates on this post will be here.
I know – it’s breaking my web app! (currently under development)
this article currently has “0 tweets”
Is there some kinda power outage going on in the Valley? This is insane. All twitter clients and twittergadget are down.
Any info/updates from the twitter blokes?
Can’t check FB tho. Blocked at work
Uh oh, MG is not gonna like Update No. 4.
Putin is now ruler of the interwebs!!!
Without Twitter they can’t function as they use it’s API
Yes, updates are there : serious denial of service attack. Facebook is getting the same shit. A strange coincidence : While all the pages of my facebook friends are more or less reachable, the ones from prominent Iranian opposition figures are completely out (e.g. Mousavi, Kathami) on facebook. This started happening only a couple of hours before Twitter got its DoS attack.
It doesn’t take a big imagination to figure out where the attack is coming from, especially since #iranelection has been a trending topic for weeks. Twitter is so difficult to block that it was about the last channel the Iranian opposition could use on the internet.
So all you frustrated Twitter geeks out there, find some Iranian GOVERNEMENT sites (e.g. http://www.gerdab.ir) and start massive attacks on them. BE CAREFUL NOT TO OVERLOAD THE IRANIAN OPPOSITION! They need web access. If you don’t know where to look, go to iran.whyweprotest.net
Revenge is ours! Have fun!
Just use identi.ca it’s open-source and decentralized. At least people will realize that it’s not particularly bright idea to rely on few centralized closed systems.
Facebook is up but a lot of its functions are down… I am unable to post a comment with the Facebook connect feature
downrightnow is a service that launched recently to monitor service disruptions at popular web services, including Twitter and LiveJournal. The site automatically posts updates about outages and service trouble and we’ve been on top of this morning’s outages — feel free to stop by for updates or to report any other issues. Who wants to place bets on the next site to drop?
Thanks for info downrightnow.com is a winner good work!
Ok, how on earth did this post receive 2 retweets already?
I could retweet it with TweetDeck.
4 up and still wondering how is that when everything is down!
Yes facebook not working properly either. I am getting things to post via PIng.fm
According to the Status page its a DDOS attack on Twitter!
WTH is a “Denial attack”? http://status.t...-service-attack
They are getting bombarded with requests which use up all of their resources, thus enabling them impossible to provide others with service
Its rare coincidence twitter and facebook attacked at the same time
Its the same with all the twitter apps
Someone managed to retweet it
Twitter goes offline for an hour and the (micro)blogosphere panics.
Let this be a reminder of the ever-increasing need for decentralized power on the Web through an increase competition and innovation.
Internet Monopolies, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL etc. wield far too much influence over social and corporate life.
What are the contingency plans when the clouds disperse? What services can you rely on? What alternatives do you have in place for safeguarding your data?
yes, but if twitter was decentralized like blogs do, would its breaking news aspect – up to the last second – still be present? if it’s going to be p2p style, i’m afraid it may be as slow as dns propagation. if it’s going to rely on a centralized pinging server, why bother when each tweet packet is so tiny?
identi.ca (which follows the federated OpenMicroBlogging spec) seems to cope well with decentralisation, I get messages from users on other networks nearly instantly.
Precisely!!!
Back on Twitter via web. Hooray! called the Bot bomb way quicker than ..(dancing around tooting own horn)
Anyone else getting the sneaking suspecting that we all just witnessed a test run? Twitter and Facebook go boom? C’mon. Someones plannin on misbehavin.
the Al Qudas fixin to order some BBQ? China fixin to go after Taiwan? Israel fixin to go a bomb bomb Iran? 4chan fixin to post more jap scat porn? (which BTW this happenin on Hiroshima anni..coincidence?) Rupert fixin to lie and charge more? Obama sendin out the black tacka tacks?
Someones wanted to see if they could make the tubes quiet.
Just feels like a test run.
Just chiming in I think its someone seeing if they could do it and use it as a threat for sure..
http://twitter..../filthyrichmond
We are hording tinned foods and begun sacrificing our pets in case this truly is the beginning of the end.
We can hear looting in the streets. We can smell cars burning. We can sense peoples microblogging frustration. We are crying to ourselves.
At least someone here is responding to the situation with the appropriate level of concern.
But what if Twitter and Facebook connect are just the beginning…
It’s all fun and games till WoW goes down too, and we have to fend off the hoard of zombie-men stumbling into the streets in search of cheetos and brains.
Nice…
priceless
lol… what about the children??
I wonder how the world will react to the inevitable cyber attack….
TechChuff…very, very funny!
Some of mine too…
Facebook is down for many people as well….
Facebook is up and down as well. It may be the Internet backbone – not the services.
What is the internet backbone?
really? Its the main core of routers and systems that make up the internet… includes major Data Centers and a majority of the internet packet routing route.
http://www.skul...et/backbone.jpg
+1
no its not.
Not good.
..is this about the patent lawsuits? Hope not.
never mind…
twitter doesn’t work in china at all…
http://status.t...17/site-is-down
It’s not good for our business
got it. thanks.
I have another story for you. Myspace has been having major problems with the messaging system. When someone comments your page or images and you have it on approve before posting Myspace erases the comment but will notify you via email that it was left. I have emailed them multiple times and they keep sending back an automated message saying that it’s a known problem.
That’s because the comment being left is spam. MySpace is removing it from your profile before you ever see it, but you’ll still have received the email that someone posted something on your profile. MySpace, after all, can’t drop into your email box and erase your emails once they realize they weren’t necessary/useful.
They’re not spam, it’s every single message that comes through. Messages as simple as “I love your music” are being deleted so it’s not spam at all, I think they’re having flaws trying to migrate to that new email system.
And here I was thinking it was my ISP!
Get well soon Twitter.
You can always tests at sites like http://www.aler...=ToolsCheckView
Nine month after …. a lot of babies will born!
You woke them up: http://status.twitter.com/
Yes, we just learned the valuable lesson of pulling down our twitter feeds, storing them in the database and just checking for diffs (and response code 200 from the feed).
Unfortunately this fix won’t really work until twitter is back up again, but for now, our site is working.
Can’t you use the API to only pull in tweets with an ID greater than the previous biggest ID you got.
Then still use the response code 200, but you shouldn’t have to worry about the diff.
I’ve never actually used the API, just briefly looked at some docs, so I may be completely wrong.
still down, this is just showed me how much I have become dependent on the service to ready my morning news…I guess I will have to open the paper this morning.
+1
Ouch… that is a very big hit.
Who else thinks this was done by hackers? EV and the other Twitter masters please hire a CSO APAP!!!!
Using Friendfeed as its working.
I’m also experiencing sporadic issues with facebook – any possible connection between the two?
I can see no one retweeted this article
Mike, I came specifically to TC to see if there is a report of the outage and I am glad you did report on it.
But no mention of the great Techcrunch outage?
http://bit.ly/1tLkWu
Tell us more about that
Good point to make Andrew, I did the same. Facebook isn’t working for me either.
The question is, will we be more productive today, or will we just sit there hitting refresh on our browsers?
Well I am sitting here staring at the screen and eating Jaffa cakes – is that your answer? lmao!
@Nicola enjoy your Jaffa cakes
Chris were you more productive?
Still no answer on the great Techcrunch outage from TC.
The only piece of info is this twitter message: http://twitter....atus/3054519095
Mike, what was the reason for the TC outage?
They’ve posted an acknowledgment on their status blog now. No details.
That’s why the headline says o tweets.
Worse yet – FB has been all error message after error message all morning too. http://ping.fm is the only way I’ve been able to post anything, anywhere this morning.
Who shot social media?
Facebook is down as well…at least accessing the login process.
It seems its not only twitter.
http://www.livejournal.com is down too.
http://downfore...livejournal.com
One would think that with twitters funding of millions, they would be able to hire SOME engineers who actually know what they are doing.
They have, and at the rate they are growing, it’s fairly impressive they have managed to solve nearly all their downtime issues.
But I’m sure you, “Joe,” could do much better.
Solving downtime issues and having proper defense in place to thwart attacks are different things.
The fact that they handle all of this traffic has no bearing if they can’t keep it properly secure, which seems to be apparent with all the hackings, etc.
Now ReTweet button is useless
The Twitpocalypse is cometh!
…what’s Facebook’s excuse?
I got it…the Facebokalypse.
Yeah now both are down for me too. Time to suffer from virtual disconnect.
*shudders*
Facebook is realllly slow for me. I’m in Chicago.
LoL yeah I tried it for the past 30 minutes or so was trying various twitter.com/username pages .. finally i thought i’d confirm outage via TC. thnx, as I was unable to confirm anything on Twitter search as I usually do – like celebrity passing, airplane crash, etc..
I think Facebook is having some problems also. Can barely get into my profile and my fan page won’t load at all.
LJ is down as well. Facebook is throwing transport errors. Looks like an attack on social media!
I’ve been able to confirm this morning that Facebook was down hard at one point, and simply timing out and not working properly at other points. It seems we’re dealing with a widespread internet outage here.
Actually, this morning we saw Facebook, LiveJournal and Twitter all be down at the same time. They all have different transit and colo’s, so it looks like a coincidence, but still…
seems to be up for some countries now (Netherlands at least): http://www.down...not.com/twitter
It’s not up in the Netherlands. Believe me.
Yes. It is out here…
the one post you can’t retweet…
You beat me to it, was just about to snark: “Somebody press the Tweet This button FAST so everyone can find out!” LOL. Definitely brings issues we’ve been talking about to light. A Google Wave like service run as a P2P network would be infinitely more robust and configurable for keeping the Global Cognition Grid online.
twitter api seems to be returning results fine (9:52 AM EST)
The search api works but not the main api. At least not for me.
They are trying to handle 45 millions users on Ruby on Rails. Rebuild everything in PHP or Python and problem solved.
Feed the troll.. by stuffing a gag down it’s throat.
A troll? I thought he was being a comedian. Support 45 million users on PHP? That was hilarious!
Seems to be working out pretty well for Facebook (200 million users). At least if you don’t count today.
Oh and TechCrunch’s 7 million monthly readers seem to thrive pretty well in the PHP environment.
I am sure I can keep going if you like.
Yeah, let’s forget what LinkedIn showed us a year ago: http://bit.ly/q7yEb
Oh and by the way, that was a year ago. And you know that Rails evolves about 2~3 times as fast as PHP don’t you? Wait… That’s nonsense?
http://php.net/goto
I rest my case…
Actually, the backend is increasingly Scala these days, which is going to be more robust than any of the languages you mentioned.
Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal all down this mornin’? Daammn… I really hope this isn’t a cyberattack. I’m just surprised YouTube ain’t down this morning too. This is very concerning…
too many people use Youtube.. including hackers… for entertainment.
Facebook and Twitter still down for me. Anyone else? It’s 9:52a EST.
Facebook is not down!
FB is nearly down … twitching and gulping for air I’d say.
Facebook was down at one point. I have the screencap to prove it. Now it’s just having issues with certain processes timing out.
Its time to move to http://tweetknot.com where I can communicate with my friends even when twitter is down if am already signed into tweetknot
What the frack? I need my random inane babble!!
1 retweet? by whom?
I agree Facebook and Twitter are both acting weird.
Eventbrite, LJ seem to be down. Facebook still has intermitten issues. Twitter via txt was working for a while, but no longer (for me). I feel like it’s a network outage because of the intermitten-ness of it all…
So, concerted attacks? Or cascading failures? 45 million people cannot reach Twitter so they post “Twitter is down” to Facebook/livejournal/ and crash those services too?
Awesome. CYBERWAR was first profile that loaded for me, just now.
http://twitter.com/cyberwar
“Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter,…” – This may be true. Does it concern anyone?
I’m seeing facebook down, twitter down … who stole my internets? Could this be an attack?
I’ve got an inkling that this is a cyber attack by somebody…
Facebook is not down, but does not work.
Both FB and Twitter down at once! I might have to go outside and get some sunlight or something.
Facebook has error messages off and on, but LiveJournal’s down for me as well…
Really serious outrage, users are engaging on friendfeed.
Ouch.
I’ll sign up for friendfeed and see what they’re saying
now what do i do?
Go over to Friendfeed, same thing could *never* happen over there. Or, learn how to take back ownership of your OWN lifestream http://tr.im/lifestream
Could you briefly explain why FriendFeed is more resilient? Thank you very much. Always like to learn.
There’s life in RSS yet
It could be true you know!