So we will now save you from having to read said posts ever again, by showing you how you can know immediately the next time Twitter is down.

And when those “OH MY GOD, TWITTER IS DOWN!!!” posts pop up, you can just ignore them. Unless Twitter is down ALL day. But we’ll show you where to go then too.

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The last time this happened was on June 21, when there was a worldwide outage for twenty minutes. What is going on with Twitter lately?
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With all the problems they’ve had the past few weeks, I’m increasingly concerned that they might to getting too big to succeed.

It seems like half the time over the last few days it takes me 2-3 attempts to even post a tweet. And missing replies… what’s that all about?

Come on guys… now we’re in the latter stages and the matches are fairly thin on the ground, you can’t use the World Cup as an excuse anymore. Hire some more people. Hire better people. Just do something about it. It’s getting embarrassing.

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Twitter addressed this somewhat on June 15, essentially laying the blame on the server-killing combo of the World Cup and the NBA Finals.

Last Friday, we detailed on our Engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We’re working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we’re facing record traffic. We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.

As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.

(The start of Wimbledon yesterday and the final round of the US Open this past weekend didn’t do much to help either.)

Fair enough. But while the World Cup has definitely turned Twitter from a moderate (if consistent) simmer to an occasional full-on boil, it’s not constant. World Cup games are fairly intermittent, and the outages don’t always occur during or immediately after the games.

And what about all those people who aren’t on Twitter during the World Cup matches? The World Cup is huge, sure, but I would imagine it’s only a fraction of people who continue to tweet whilst watching their country play (I know I don’t), or during the bigger games. I would expect that the majority of football fans log off and sit in front of their TV, entirely Twitter-free.

Sure, in the scheme of things, this is an acceptable period of instability. It’s unprecedented stuff. And Twitter is addressing some of these issues by intentionally taking the site down in the less-busy periods to perform essential maintenance. Which is clearly massively important, as the platform evidently has a problem supporting tweets during the peaks of major sporting events – especially when they come en masse.

That said, we’ve been here before, of course. The death of Michael Jackson hit the internet hard, and Twitter was no exception. While the tweet-per-second rate has set new highs during the World Cup, I find it hard to believe that it’s anywhere near the level of traffic and attention that the network received when Jackson passed – certainly like-for-like. The growth in users should have been cancelled out by the growth in staff and available funds.

Believe it or not, but Michael Jackson died exactly one year ago this coming Saturday – you’d have hoped that Twitter would have learned something about visitor management by now. After all, I haven’t seen Google or Facebook going down during the World Cup. Have you?

(Image credit: Diamondie.)

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Twitter has seen just 55 minutes of downtime thus far in March, a massive improvement on some of the frightening numbers we saw last year (although most of these can be traced back to one or two very bad days).

The uptime number is pretty impressive, but it’s interesting that the average response has been steadily getting slower since last November’s benchmark. Certainly not enough to notice, but that’s a trend that Biz Stone et al will want to see (at least) flattened. A significant reversal might be an unreasonable expectation given the growth we’ve seen in monthly tweet numbers.

Still, it does give confidence in the system, and makes you realise that Twitter isn’t as down anywhere near as much as it used to be. Although you might think otherwise judging by the number of tweets about it, even if asking ‘Is Twitter down?’ on Twitter is about as surreal as you can get.

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Many users had frozen timelines that hadn’t updated for hours, and others weren’t able to log into the service at all.

A lot of people were, perhaps understandably, furious. It’s often only when something is taken away from us, or presented in a way that is less than ideal or compromised, that we begin to realise the true value.

I reported on the issue, and when it looked like it wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon, I did what I felt was the smartest thing in the situation – I closed down my computer, and I went out for the day.

If necessary, I could still monitor events on my iPhone. But really, it was nice to have a break. I’m on Twitter a lot, but it isn’t my life. My work, family and friends all come first, although my television time has definitely taken a beating.

But it is a huge part of my life, and that holds true for a lot of other people, too, including brands, journalists, small business owners, and everybody else who uses the resource to send and receive news, information and ideas. Twitter needs to sort out these downtime problems, because as the platform continues to expand and becomes an even bigger part of all of our lives, these blackout periods are increasingly becoming unacceptable.

The company hasn’t quite reached the too big to fail stage, at least not yet, but the concept has. After two years, Twitter isn’t something I do anymore. It just is. I don’t think, “I should see what’s happening on Twitter!” and then make myself go there. It’s all very natural and organic. I realise it isn’t that way for everybody, or even most people, but, month by month, it’s getting there. Every day, there’s more of us, and less of them.

As Dave Winer suggests, Twitter needs to start thinking about the big picture and sharing the server workload, even if it’s with competitors. If it’s an issue, now, with an estimated hundred million users, just how big a problem, and how much of an impact is downtime going to make on our lives when a billion people are left blankly staring at the error page?

(And the best part? When it finally comes back, half of all the new tweets are users complaining that the service was down. I’m just grateful there was something on TV.)

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This used to be a fairly regular occurrence, of course, but it’s a pretty rare event nowadays. Indeed, I believe the last major failure was in October 2009, so that’s pretty good going for a company that is now delivering some 50 million tweets a day.

But, and as always, the real concern with Twitter is their ongoing problem with support and announcements. Head on over to the official status blog, and there’s nothing about this issue. Read the tweets from @twitter, and they haven’t updated since Friday.

No doubt we’ll get the official word from Twitter five minutes after it’s all started working again. If this has all been happening for more than eight hours (as Dave Winer suggests), then this verges somewhere between unacceptable and unforgivable.

It’s social media, right? What does it say when you don’t use your own platform to make announcements about your own platform? Maybe social negligence is closer to the truth.

UPDATE: Finally, Twitter is “aware of the issue and investigating.”

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