Twitter, Uptime, & Product Reliability

Posted by Michael Koby

May 28, 2008

Twitter has been pretty much unusable the last 2 weeks. Things started to get bad last week, and then over the weekend they had a database crash which has caused them to turn features off and have extremely slow performance since Friday.

Twitter has never been perfect. Its consistant downtime has been the subject of much debate since the the service debuted a little over a year ago. The continuance of this downtime at greater intervals over the last month has rendered the service all but useless.

Current issues include:

No pagenation on Twitter website
No IM support (some of us don’t have unlimited text messaging)
Constant “Limit Exceeded” on API driven applications (even when there is NO way an app could have hit the limit) – this is apparently due to a throttle placed on the API that Twitter has not made extremely known.
Slow performance resulting in missing updates completely or getting them late

With these kind of issues, and no real word on when things will return to “normal” it is distressing to see that people still use and rely on this service (myself included). Imagine what would happen if someone like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears started using Twitter. The service would crumble from the spike in usage. Twitter needs to get its act together, because if this keeps up much longer, people really will move to something else (FriendFeed?) if they find Twitter to be this continuously unreliable.