We’re shocked (shocked!) that yes, Twitter is broken again. Once again, rather than the Fail Whale, it’s been getting the annoyingly bland 503 error on and off all night. And while the service may appear to be up for you, it may be an illusion. Despite the frontend fading in and out of existence, new tweets aren’t being reliably passed through as of right now. And third-party services getting data through the APIs are seeing delays.
But while a lot of these Twitter issues are old hat, and far from shocking, today brought about a couple new annoying issue from the service.
The winner: Because Twitter is now tracking all outbound links, and having these 503 errors, a huge number of links that would normally have been working today were caught up in the 503 errors, and seemed to be broken. They weren’t, Twitter is.
The runner-up: Twitter’s @reply sidebar button was more or less broken the entire day. Sometimes it would work, but more often then not it would just keep on spinning, without serving up any results.
Fun times, especially when you’re trying to test Twitter-based services to write up. That new datacenter is supposedly up and running, but for some reason Twitter is not. Let’s see how she does during the Apple keynote tomorrow.
[thanks Josh and Wally]