14 DAY TRIAL // As any of Twitter’s more than 100 million users would tell you, the service has had a very rough week. The site has been down several times, on occasions for a few hours, and, unfortunately, things are not about to get any better. Twitter has been trying to keep people informed and warned last week that this might happen. Now, it’s providing a more detailed account on the source, or rather, sources of the problems.
“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,” Sean Garrett, Twitter’s head of communications, wrote in a blog post.
“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,” he explained.
Twitter says it is working on solutions to fix its scalability issues in the long run, but that doesn’t do much for those experiencing the downtime and problems now. For the moment, the influx of traffic due to the World Cup, which Twitter anticipated yet was still found unprepared for, is bringing the service to its knees.
Unfortunately, as the team was working to fix the issues and cope with the traffic, they caused even more problems and the downtime Twitter experienced on Monday. While this was also fixed, there are more downtimes planned.
Twitter warns that the service will go down for maintenance work several times over the next couple of weeks. These periods will be announced ahead of time and Twitter says it will avoid doing this during World Cup matches. In all likelihood, the problems from last week will continue for at least a few more weeks.