Twitter Down Archive

It appears that Twitter is currently down for most users – I was first unable to access the site around 3am Eastern time. As of the time of this post, 8:30am Eastern time, I am still unable to access Twitter.com. The Twitter status site notes, “Currently experiencing elevated error rates — You may experience some problems loading twitter.com and with Twitter clients.  We are aware of the problem and are taking action.”

Based on some searches on Google, it does appear that some people are able to post messages — it does look like if you use a third-party client (Seesmic, HooterSuite, TweetDeck) you might still be able to get in.

This is the first time for an extended Twitter outage in quite a long time. In the old days of Twitter outages, we would all hop on the bus to Friendfeed but that is no longer an option since many have left that service.

Update 9:45am Eastern – Several of my undercover sources tell me this might have to do with the snow in San Francisco.

Update 2 – 10:15am Eastern – Twitter is back – now go post all the things you would have posted if Twitter was up and running.

If you are a social media ninja, social media rockstar and are really upset or need someone to talk to because of this outage, please call 867-5309.

As always, please report in if Twitter is down for you – include your location, whether you use a client tool or the main Twitter.com site and what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Of course, the outage gives me a chance to share Twitter Come Back one more time!

So by now you probably know that Skype took some time off earlier this week. Now it appears popular marketing service Twitter is also acting all down, over capacity and/or acting funky – as if the service drank some big cups of spiked egg nog. I also noticed that Twitter widgets are not loading any content.

It’s really a horrible time for Twitter to be down – I mean people are just waiting to run to Twitter to tell the world what gifts Santa brought!

The Twitter status blog notes, “Site Availability Issues – We’re currently experiencing some site availability issues; we’re looking into it now and will update when we have more information.”

Update 2:10pm Eastern – it does appear Twitter is back…you may resume telling the world what gifts you have received and if you celebrate Festivus, you may now air your grievances.

When I try to load Twitter, I see one of the following:

• error message – Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing—we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.
• fail whale – “over capacity message”
• sometimes Twitter loads but the timeline doesn’t load any gift messages

Please report in if you are having issues telling the world what you are doing on Twitter – make sure to include your location in your comment. Since I know it’s important, you can also leave your received gifts in the comments as well.

Maybe it’s a new trend – servers going down! Today it appears that Amazon has decided to join the crowd. Amazon is currently down as of 2:15pm Eastern and has been down for at least a bit, reports several CN readers.

When I attempt to load amazon.com, I get:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

That’s right, big arse Amazon seems to wanna be hip and trendy so they took the service down, or should I say unavailable. We’ve all seen what Twitter can do with some downtime and other large Internet services are feeling left out. YouTube for example had an outage recently to raise their hip level.

We are considering taking CN down later today because heck, we are the coolest tech blog out there today!

On a serious note, where’s Amazon’s status reporting service? How much income is being lost each minute they are down? It does look like Amazon’s S3 is up based on files loading here on CN.

As usual, please report in if Amazon is down where you are.

Update: 4:05pm Eastern – Amazon now reports the following “pretty” outage message:

Update: 2:22pm Eastern – Twitter couldn’t let Amazon have the fun alone – they decided to go down as well!

Update: 2:25pm Eastern – Greg Sandoval has done the math – “Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.”

Ancient civilizations used the sun to determine what time it is, Apple fanboys use their iPhone. Me, I use Twitter to tell what time it is! That’s right, with their daily outages from nearly exactly 6-7pm Eastern, if it’s down and the sun is up, it’s 6pm.

I can’t say I always agree with Duncan Riley, but he’s spot on regarding Twitter’s outages. Twitter has mad cash, is located in the valley, has celebrity founders, a mega VC blogger and they can’t find people to help them get the service going? Somehow I am betting if they put out a call for help tonight, they’d have 100 developers working all night (probably for free sadly) to help get Twitter working right.

I am not suggesting that the Twitter team isn’t working on it and I am sure they all feel like ka-ka because of the outages.  Perhaps it’s time for a regroup.

What’s really amazing is that even with all of the outages, everyone stays. How many other apps would have this type of loyalty? It’s like we are all rooting for Twitter to win.

Update: Twitter has explained the reason for the outage. Apparently it’s too much Jibber Jabber! What we should do is create a database of downtime reasons and give it to them :-P

Of course, the outage gives me a chance to share Twitter Come Back one more time!