Twitter Uptime Woes and Tear-Water Tweets

Posted on April 21, 2008

The latest Twitter problem would make a perfect addition to the tear-water tea Owl makes in Arnold Lobel's short story "Tear-water Tea" - from the children's book Owl at Home.

"Tweets that no one ever sees because they never arrive," said Owl. Owl was crying. Many large tears dropped into the kettle.

This happened with much greater frequency in 2007. It happened multiple times that year as Twitter struggled with rapid growth and it was always very confusing and frustrating. Much of Twitter's growth this year has been during a period of very good uptime.

Paris Lemon calls the partial tweet outage Twitter Fail: Day 3 and points to the Twitter Status Twitter. There's also a @Twitter Twitter but Twitter doesn't seem to be updating this one. Mathew Ingram notes that the last entry on the Twitter blog is from five days ago. He also links to the Get Satisfaction entry about the problem where there are now 300 comments. Twitter also has all of our email addresses. Twitter has several options for letting people know about the progress they are making on fixing major problems. They should make better use of them.

It would have been nice if Twitter had worked through this bug over the weekend. Twitter will eventually be working again. As we have said in the past there isn't much you can do but wait. You can cry about it like Owl and make your own pot of tear-water tea or you can find something else constructive to do with the downtime.