What you saw at twitter.com the afternoon of 5/13/09
If you use Twitter, you may have noticed it wasn’t there Wednesday afternoon May 13th. Conspiratorial theories, notwithstanding, this probably was not:
- Satanic hackers observing the 13th
- A cyberattack war game
- A ploy from Twitter to start charging for the service
As I write this, even Google appears to be temporarily unavailable making me wonder about option 2.
This is not the first Twitter outage and, unlike more common intermittent failures, appears to have been controlled. Given Twitters remarkable growth, as the chart below shows, occasional service disruptions are understandable.
Growth in Twitter traffic
What’s intriguing is that fervent Twitter users did not seem to be very upset. Of course without Twitter, they’d have to complain the old fashioned way. What bartender wants to hear such a tale of woe? Let’s declare a happy hour next time Twitter goes down.