Twitter (News - Alert) users experienced about a half hour of multiple technical issues on Monday, June 3rd from 1:08p.m. to 1:33 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time and problems may have continued for another twenty minutes after the initial site issue.
The glitch, which prevented users’ tweet streams from updating, among other problems, was said to be an “erroneous change,” according to Twitter’s status blog.
In June of 2012, the site crashed from noon to 1:10p.m. ET and again from 1:40p.m. until 2:08p.m. ET. At that point, Twitter had claimed in the past six months it had at least 99.96 percent site reliability and stability. The Wall Street Journal announced that it was “one of the next viable candidates for an initial public offering and has recently stressed the reliability of its service, which was prone to outages in its early days.” The beginning of this year alone would prove otherwise and if it is an initial public offering Twitter wants, there is a lot more work to be done.
In the last five months there have been 10 site issues, three of them occurring during one week in January.
Twitter hosts over 200 million monthly active users and boasts over 400 million tweets sent per day but its complexity contributes to these blips and the appearance of the infamous “fail whale.”
Computerworld reflects on the event and how it highlights the mistakes large Internet companies can make during live software updates. For a company that wishes to polish its reputation, 7-year-old Twitter is jeopardizing its endeavors to create a mature brand.
Twitter continues to intensify its content. In April, it expanded its Cards program, a feature that allows partners such as newspaper publishers to embed additional content in their tweets. A month later, it purchased Lucky Sort, a data analytics company, a move that would help accumulate a better understanding of its users’ tweets.
As it grows, the margin for site errors only grows larger. While Twitter attempts to accommodate its users by expanding and analyzing data, focusing on these gratuitous malfunctions would be better advised for its growing user base and its desired IPO status.
Edited by Rich Steeves
