I love Twitter, you know that by now. However, it’s that kind of love that keeps me sticking with it, because otherwise I wouldn’t accept the amount of downtime and technical issues the service has. Seriously, it’s crazy, they have this huge amount of users, which is the problem of course, but also the solution. It’s like they don’t scale, which they most likely do, they just don’t do it nicely enough.
Twitter is too big for their own good.
Like the most recent outage, the main database crash that happened this weekend. They’re telling me this on May 24:
We have to put the service into an unscheduled maintenance mode to recover. Folks will see degraded service for the next few hours.
Today, being May 26 where I am, possibly very early or late where you are, I’m getting this on my Twitter page:
For those of you that don’t want to squint, it says:
Twitter will be short some features while we recover from a database crash. See our blog post for the whole story.
I get it, you’re big, Twitter! But you have issues and you need to handle it. The fact that you are this big makes you survive, but what will you do when/if Google get Jaiku up as a real contender? You know, Jaiku is technically better, and a lot more stable.
Database crashes and technical issues are scary horrible evil things, I sympathize, I really do. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re OK.
I think Twitter is too big for its own good, and it’s not even true mainstream yet. I wonder if I’ll be in love with the service in 3, 6, or 12 months from now. Will you?
