The person that America decides to elect as President is and should be important to everybody – not just folks in the USA. But what should matter and what does matter rarely goes hand-in-hand, and suffice to say for every tweet proactively reporting about the election, there will be another tweet complaining about the coverage (or about Twitter’s coverage specifically, which is when it all gets very meta).

Bottom line: Twitter is going to be busy. Very busy. Will it stand up to the strain?

continued…

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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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Of course, there’s nothing about any of this at the moment on the status blog.

Updates if and when they happen.

UPDATE 12:39 GMT: I’ve had it back a couple of times on Twitter.com, but it’s a fleeting glimpse at best before going down again.

UPDATE 12:45 GMT: Seems to be fully operational once more.

UPDATE 13:45 GMT: From Twitter, “We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.”

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Feel free to try it yourself.

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This used to be a fairly regular occurrence but it’s the first time it’s happened in this manner for a while. (Recent outages have been more terminal, with the network being completely inaccessible.)

Hopefully it won’t be too long before it’s back up and running again.

UPDATE: I’ve also noted my following and followers counts keep resetting to zero. Also, if you visit select profiles, they seem to be updating, but it’s not coming through within your timeline.

1630 GMT: Curiously, Facebook appears to be glitching as well. I’m having to post updates twice before they ‘stick’. This can only mean one thing – alien invasion. They’re using our social networks against us!

1900 GMT: Replies appear to be working and appearing in your mentions folder. Reply somebody and if they reply you back, you should see it. (Thanks to @trniii for the tip.) You can also see updates by visiting profiles directly, or by using Twitter search.

Meantime, Twitter has updated their status blog with a report on the problem and is looking into it.

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The thing is, one day, inevitably, something awful will happen. Servers will crash, hackers will run riot, and data will be lost. Your data.

I’m reminded once again why a facility to both backup and (critically) restore your tweets is nothing short of essential. Nobody likes the idea of having to start over. Particularly if it’s not your fault.

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