When Twitter itself goes down, you’ll have to turn to other social networking services like Facebook to post a “Status Update” on “WTF is up – or is it down – with Twitter?”, Google+ or some other social service.
Twitter was down for approximately two hours according to the apology by Twitter’s Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of Engineering (@mazenra) at the Twitter Blog, where Mr Rawadshdeh said: “We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter”.
Mr Rawadesh goes on to explain that the system and its backup “coincidentally” failed “at nearly the same time”, as Mr Rawadesh put it, which he said was “noteworthy”.
Without explaining the bug/s that was able to take down both main and backup system within a short time of each other and saying the twin failures were the cause of an “infrastructural double-whammy”, we’re left to wonder what went wrong, and why, with Mr Rawadesh stating that he and his team are “investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future”.
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He then “deeply” apologises on his and his infrastructure team’s behalf “for the interruption you had today” (26 July 2012), and promises to “Now” get “back to making the service even better and more stable than ever”.
No doubt additional backup and failover systems if not upgrading to more robust equipment is all part of the plan as Twitter’s popularity exponentially grows, and each failure, even with one that disrupts global access to the Twitter platform for just over two hours, is a learning experience that helps you to avoid the situation again in the future.
If Twitter outages start happening on a regular basis people will obviously start wondering what the heck is going and getting worried, but outages obviously do happen to what are supposed to be the best of us – at least when it comes to running a social communications platform like Twitter.
Until then, Twitter was out for a couple of hours, and any other social network was at your disposal to share your thoughts and feelings with anyone that’s interested, or discovers you in the future and sees what you had to say from then until they find you.
A two hour gap is significant and insignificant all at the same time, with Twitter promising it is on the job to fix the problem - and scale up as required!
