Twitter's legendary downtime Jan30 '08

Reading Gruber's mention of 99.9999% uptime guarantee got me thinking about Twitter's constant downtime - especially during big events happening in the world.

For example, during the Macworld 2008 keynote address, Twitter came to a screeching halt. It literally happened as soon as Steve Jobs took stage and began talking. This kind of unreliability is not good, especially considering the little overall impact Macworld has on the globe. What if something of real significance happens, like a terrorist attack or a major natural disaster? How will Twitter (or any social network promising instant worldwide communication) remain stable?

According to Gruber's link, it simply may not be possible. Even services that promise 99.9999% guaranteed uptime are only fooling themselves, because even one outage that lasts a single hour will diffuse that downtime promise for the next century. It's an unrealistic promise, even for mega-corporations like Amazon or Microsoft.

So even if Twitter was run by Amazon or Microsoft, with a strong network backbone, I can't imagine Twitter "outages" would be less frequent.

This is because Twitter's rate of exposure is far greater than most sites that claim to sustain a 99.9999% uptime. Simply put - since we access Twitter more frequently, we are more likely to acknowledge the outages.

Most sites probably have the same amount of outages, but since we aren't hitting those sites as much as we do Twitter, we just don't notice it.

So, Twitter is only guilty by association.

Chris Lott puts it pretty well:

Any service that is intended to support a constant, nearly real-time stream of input will, of course, make its instability known more regularly. So flickr downtime is less frustrating than del.icio.us downtime, which is less frustrating than Twitter downtime. And, of course, the user who is already skeptical about the value of the activity may be the quickest of all to move on.

So if you're noticing Twitter downtime, that probably means you're using it way too much.

Categories: Efficiency , Technology , Twitter

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matthom is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.