According to the Twitter status blog, Twitter has been down on and off for over an hour now. For a real-time communication service like Twitter, that’s a long time to have serious issues like this.
As we know, when the news of Steve Jobs’ passing hit, Twitter was under heavy load for hours with tweets. Impressively, the service withstood the load for the most part, with only intermittent outages. It’s important to note, that through these hiccups, the Twitter status blog was never updated, so it seems as if this is a serious issue.
As of the original writing (9:59pm PT), the site has been showing errors when trying to tweet, or not loading at all. The Twitter status blog reports that engineers have identified the issue and are working on it. Not even Twitter’s famous “Fail Whale” has been loading.
To illustrate the importance of Twitter, I was receiving a few texts a minute in the last half hour asking me if Twitter was up or down and if the issue was on their end.
When I try to tweet now, I get this error:
It looks like random tweets are getting through but clearly not consistently.
We’ll update this post as Twitter updates its status.
Update 1: Twitter seems to be performing as expected as of 10:26pm PT, no word as of yet from Twitter on what the actual issue was/is and whether it is completely fixed.
Update 2: At 11:39pm PT, Twitter’s status blog now reports:
Update: This issue has been resolved.
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