Twitter's Downtime Impacting Growth?

Posted on March 29, 2007

Twitter continues to be plagued by outages and periods of slowness. The popular microblogging service has been down this morning. Marshall Kirkpatrick wonders just how much bigger Twitter would already be if it wasn't for all the downtime.

How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it's unavailable? I have never engaged in sustained use of a web app that is down this much - I can imagine large numbers of other people just walk away and never come back. Everybody says Evan Williams has struck gold in this wildly succesful new service - but I'm sure he knows there's a real risk of that never proving true do to constant service problems. Good luck to the Twitter folks - I sure wish the site was up!

The folks at Twitter are constantly working on it but it must be difficult when the number of people trying to log on and sign up is growing faster than your ability to add new servers and increase the website's capacity. The growing mainstream press may also be helping to cripple Twitter's website. They've been featured on CBS, Time and Businessweek just this week. People have also been noticing other tweaks Twitter has made to reduce load on the service. Yesterday, we noted on our Twitter microblog (after Steve Rubel noted it) that Twitter had reduced the refresh rate on people's Twitter pages from every two minutes to every ten minutes. During the downtime Twitter fans may be forced to blog about today's news events -- like Karl Rove's crazy rap -- instead of Twittering about them.