Twitter Outage

[rogerd]

Is anyone else seeing a lengthy Twitter outage, not even so much as a fail whale? I'm seeing some bloggers reporting this.

Normally I'd check Twitter to see if a major site was really down, but, ummm...

[rogerd]

Ahh, here it is:

[washingtonpost.com...]

Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say "Site is down - We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.").

[rogerd]

In a related development, U.S. businesses reported a mysterious 15% increase in office-worker productivity Thursday morning...
;)

[goaliegirl]

Only 15%? ;-)

[pageoneresults]

[Status.Twitter.com...]

^ That's the first place I go when Twitter appears to be down. And then I double check at...

[IsTwitterDown.com...]

Downtime has been almost non-existent these past few months. I have this sneaky feeling that they are going to announce that they were compromised or something.

There are 45 million Twits right now without access. I'm sure some of them may be pondering the meaning of life at this very moment. The one's that aren't bots (68%). :)

[jatar_k]

maybe that's what is causing facebook to not show up or have login problems, I have been having problems with it as long as twitter has been down

<added>a lot of 'document contains no data' and refused connections

which one is the chicken?

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:42 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[wyweb]

Ditto on facebook...

[tonynoriega]

ooopsy... looks like someone found a way to post more than 140 chars... and overloaded their servers.

[rogerd]

ROFL, tonynoriega, I think you nailed it. Soon, the hunt for the culprit will begin... ;)

[pageoneresults]

Many sites that rely on data from Twitter are currently experiencing problems e.g. Facebook, Posterous, etc.

Looks like someone found a way to post more than 140 chars... and overloaded their servers.

It wasn't me! I was just waking up when the site was going down. ;)

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:51 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[engine]

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

[jatar_k]

>> We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

just block P1 and a couple others I can think of and the page views will drop down to a comfortable level

;)

<added>DoS, honestly, those servers are only 10 page views from committing hari kari on any given day as far as I see

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:55 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[netmeg]

I resemble that remark.

[pageoneresults]

Funny how we've brought the conversation over to WebmasterWorld. Every person so far in this topic is a Twitterholic or has the disease and their bodies are fighting it.

Brett, can you give us a 140 window please? And don't forget to let me post up to 250 with JS off. :)

Overview of Twitter's Uptime History
[Pingdom.com...]

You can also watch the real time detox here...

[Search.Twitter.com...]

<added> Ah, we can go back to work now. Twitter is UP!

[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:03 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[jatar_k]

can we get a revised version of the word uptime for twitter?

I can seldom get it to respond in a timely manner, pages blow up or come half sent or time out

maybe response quality would be a better stat for busy sites

[creative craig]

[status.twitter.com...]

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

<added>Read before I post ;)</added>

[GaryK]

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack

I still can't seen to get thru though.

At some point we should stop reporting on the updates and discuss the implications of service interruptions like this. Do you want to reply so much on a service that can't seem to defend itself against a DDOS attack? I've seen smaller sites weather these kinds of things more effectively. Is it wrong to expect better of a major site like Twitter?

[g1smd]

When my Twitter Client failed to send new messages, I checked via the web, and the connection timed out every time.

I forgot about status.twitter.com but pingdom told me all that I needed to know: 21 seconds to load a single HTML page that contained no images, CSS or scripts.

Interestingly, sites like the BBC are reporting that "traffic is 4% down on normal" for the last hour or so. Is that the percentage of traffic to their site that they get from viral Twitter click-throughs? [news.bbc.co.uk...]

Strangely, some of the bots that I have running are not returning error messages when accessing Twitter search; I'm not sure if Twitter is returning blank pages or real data for those.

[g1smd]

Update: Within minutes of Twitter coming back up, BBC stats pages report "traffic is back to normal" for BBC sites.

[GaryK]

But for me at least Twitter's not back up. I'm still getting connection timed out errors. And Facebook is still painfully slow.

[g1smd]

Err, yeah. I got in once and now it has gone again.

I would tell the BBC the exact time the service failed, but they haven't enabled comments on this story: [news.bbc.co.uk...] -- "It is not yet clear when the outage began or whether the service has suffered a global blackout."

[edited by: g1smd at 3:33 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[GaryK]

Facebook has now died on me completely. I get through but all I see are blank white pages. I never knew there was such a close tie-in between the two sites. Always thought they were quite the rivals.

[g1smd]

Could it be that as no-one is on Twitter right now, that it is just the extra traffic to FB that is causing the issue with FB?

[GaryK]

I just woke up so of course I didn't think of the obvious! ;)

[netmeg]

Or possible the same DOS attack that's going after Twitter is also going after Facebook.

MySpace must be feeling terribly left out.

[ork ork]

[GaryK]

MySpace must be feeling terribly left out.

Haha.

Would anyone care to speculate on whether we're finally seeing all those machines compromised by Conficker being put to use?

ADDED: I can reach my Twitter page now.

ADDED2: Now I can't reach my Twitter page. Clearly recovery efforts are ongoing.

[StoutFiles]

What will the world do without Facebook and Twitter? Where will people go to post meaningless thoughts and dull events of their day?

[Leosghost]

world wide spam and drivel purge ..hope it lasts

[pageoneresults]

Definitely down for the count now. [Search.Twitter.com...] is now out of the picture. You'd think they were operating this site out of their basement or something. I hate to say that but this type of downtime is going to harm their credibility. Each minute they are down, they are losing users. Probably a small percentage but we NEVER forget.

Where will people go to post meaningless thoughts and dull events of their day?

I say WebmasterWorld give us a Twitter like interface so we can come over here when Twitter is down. :)

[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:50 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]

[g1smd]

I guess that

DDoS

will be top of the trending topics as the vast majority of the users comment on the DDoS as soon as they get access... further contributing to the DDoS itself. Erk.

UPDATE: Yes, even with limited access, many hundreds of people per minute talking about DDoS. Idiots.

Down at 13:05 UTC. Sporadically back up 15:09 UTC onwards. More stable after 15:50 UTC.

[edited by: g1smd at 3:57 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]