Twitter downtimes… meh June 15, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , . And exactly 3 rambling responses.

There have been a lot of complaints recently about downtimes over at Twitter, which I think is a little unfair. There have been accusations that the underlying system and script behind Twitter does not scale, some attacks towards them because they apparently only run three database servers and even the creation of a new web service to use when Twitter is down. Are we really this addicted? Is Twitter really this essential? Is Twitter a component of life as we know it?

Downtimes are bad, and everyone gets them, even the mighty Gooder. Of course, Twitter does seem to be especially skilled at lots of downtime, but their still up 90%+ of the time. Apparently that’s not good enough, because people complain about it. In my eyes, they are doing a great job, I can’t see how they make money out of Twitter (no ads, no premium, no nothing), but even if it doesn’t make money, they do a great job with it. Downtimes are to be expected, because they’re not like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft; they can’t afford a bazillion datacenters with trillions of servers across the world, yet they still run a good, reasonably fast service.

All in all I think the team at Twitter deserve a bit of respect from the public, rather than complaint after complaint. Well done Twitter, I love the service with the (very small) downtimes!