It seems in the past few minutes, Twitter Lists have been disabled. Only implemented a few weeks ago, the lists feature is the prime suspect in causing the influx of ‘fail whales’ appearing on Twitter. After taking a quick look at the Status Blog, it seems they are aware of the high error rate and are ‘looking in to it‘.
Update: They have confirmed Twitter Lists will be temporarily disabled until a full diagnosis of the cause of the error is made.
There’s been some speculation as to the cause, but it seems a little coincidental that a range of major Twitter clients such as Tweetie and Tweetdeck have all released software updates with the ‘Lists’ feature and within 24 hours, it’s causing massive disruption. It’s possible the feature is resource-intensive and thus causing problems for Twitter’ servers.
Regardless of the cause, I’m sure this isn’t the end of the line for Twitter Lists, it’ll be revived in a matter of no time, I’m sure. Irrespective, I’m hoping not to see Mr. Fail Whale, over and over any time soon!
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We’ll update this post as soon as there are any updates.
Update: At approximately 11:30pm, Twitter Lists came back online. Taken from the Twitter Status Blog: ‘Update: (3:30p): We have turned the Lists feature back on.’
So no explanation as to what happened, odd…I’m just glad they’re back online. Just another day at the Twitter Office some might say!
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