Tweety's Not Feeling So Good These Days -- Network Concerns Plague Twitter

Twitter has become the new revolution in social media -- there can be no denying it. But the question has become -- can Twitter keep up with its fan base? Recent concerns about Twitter's network capacity have drawn all kinds of publicity.

 

Back in 2009, when Twitter was facing one of its more popular spikes, comScore (News - Alert) executive vice president Jack Flanagan commented, 'Twitter has certainly become an Internet phenomenon over the past few months, but March represented an especially big gain for the site as it added more than 5 million visitors versus the previous month.' He added, 'with numerous celebrities and media personalities - including Oprah - recently jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, the site shows no signs of slowing.'

 

Twitter is as popular as ever, and the current strain placed on the network should attest to the company's invariable hipness. And many of those hip-with-the-times subscribers have been busily Tweeting about insanely popular events, like the World Cup - resulting in an overloaded infrastructure.

 

But…the social media giant's technicians aren't being idle on the job. They have been Tweeting about the issues at hand. Visitors to Twitter's website or followers of its IT channels have been receiving Tweets such as 'Site-wide availability issues. - We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to a network service,' and 'Bursts of Errors - We're seeing large bursts of errors every twenty minutes. We're currently investigating.'

 

These updates about networking concerns have been made as frequently as every hour, which engenders my personal respect for the Twitter's handling of this matter. Instead of trying to cover up the issues and save face, Twitter is embracing the flaws and doing its best to keep consumers in the loop. It has posted a full explanation for the issues, even going so far as to admit the errors that it made which contributed to the poor service.

 

And Twitter announced what it has done to make improvements. The company doubled the capacity and monitoring capabilities of its internal network and rebalanced and redistributed traffic to increase efficiency. Quite promptly. They also thanked followers for their continued patience and enthusiasm - perhaps hoping to encourage their continuous, loyal chirping well into the future.