Twitter’s problems from last week continue, as the site has been down or experiencing serious issues for several hours and has just recovered recently. The issues have been caused by a combination of things, but they can be traced down to human error and abnormally high traffic. Everything seems to be working at this point, but the recent events have had people wondering just for how long Twitter will stay up this time.
“We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this,” an entry on the Twitter
status blog read, describing the cause of the problems. The site was unavailable or running very poorly for about four hours. This comes less than a day after similar availability issues.
Understandably, users were very upset. Long-time Twitter users may have been hit with a wave of nostalgia as outages and the fail whale were a common occurrence in the early days. But this hasn’t been the case for more than a year now, so most of Twitter’s 100 million plus users that joined in that period were clearly not accustomed to it, giving rise to a number of topics related to the outages, some not the most flattering. One Trending Topic simply read, “Stupid Twitter.”
The confusion was also caused by users who saw their tweets missing, but didn’t realize that this was just a display error and that their precious musings were still safe and sound on Twitter’s servers.
Twitter warned last week that it might not be able to operate normally under the strain of new traffic largely related to the World Cup. It experienced several issues last week and had
major problems on Sunday. The latest issues were due to human error, so, now that they’re fixed, they shouldn’t affect the site anymore. Still, Twitter is not making any promises.
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