TweetMeme Down; No One Can Retweet Paid Twits

TweetMeme, the service built completely on top of Twitter, has been down for over half a day as of the time of this posting. I first noticed that the service was having issues midday Tuesday when the little “retweet” button wasn’t being displayed on our stories. I noticed the button was also missing on Mashable. Luckily the button degrades very nicely so except for a bunch of beeps that it can’t find the server, the pages still loads just fine.

TweetMeme creator Nick Halstead posted several messages on Twitter – the last one coming 12 hours ago. He has three posts related to the outage:

• we are having a problem with our DNS for TweetMeme – we are trying to get it fixed ASAP
• .@Fasthosts your going to have some SERIOUS bad press soon unless you sort out problems out
• anyone know people at internic? we need help with a DNS issue ASAP

Twitter users are also posting about the TweetMeme outage. Apparently there is a full TweetMeme site that shows off the most popular stories based on who clicks the button the most. While the API didn’t load yesterday, for most of the day the main site did load as I noticed a couple of tech blogs up on the home page. As of the time of this posting, the main site was unaccessible as well. It appears that the main TweetMeme twitter account is working although the stream seems slow.

TweetMeme was in the news last week with the launch of “retweetable ads”.

You might use this down time to start to plan your Black Friday shopping. I wonder if this is affecting traffic to the Twitter-heavy blogs.

Update 10AM Eastern: The TweetMeme site is back – it appears you can now find all of the techcrunch and mashable stories on their home page once again.