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Tech Check
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Is Twitter suffering from more growing pains, again? Indeed the Web site appears to be down for a chunk of its users, both here on the West Coast, and some on the East Coast, as well as locations in between, showing the error message for those trying to log in that "Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets." And there's a cute picture of a happy whale to go along with it.
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None too funny for the mega-growth, hyper-blogging Web site that continues to capture the imagination of millions of users even though no one is quite clear as to how the company plans to make money, or if it has made any money at all.
The company has been inundated by users, who are restricted in their communication to only 140 characters per post. It's become the hottest thing going in social networking, though big companies are now turning to the service for viral marketing in much the same way they started to use News Corp.'s [NWS
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] MySpace unit and Google's[GOOG
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] YouTube site for much the same thing.
Twitter has been called the SMS of the Internet, essentially offering a mix of texting and posting for its users. Forrester estimates there are as many as 5 million "twitterers," and other market research ranks the company as the third largest social networking site behind MySpace and Facebook.
The question, however, is whether Twitter is beginning to buckle under the huge amount of growth the company has endured in a very short period of time. Twitter outages, according to many blogs, have become increasingly common — at one point, spawning a specialty Web site entitled "Is Twitter down or not?"
On Wednesday, Twitter on its blog indicated that a database issue was leading to lost "tweets" and updates, so it appears today's outage may have been a result of the company addressing those problems. On Tuesday, another database issue arose as users tried to registered their mobile phones with Twitter.
Twitter traffic has erupted over the past few days ahead of college basketball's March Madness. Obama's California visit, and maybe even tweets about the service being down are crushing the servers.
I have tried to reach the principals at Twitter for a comment and status report about this latest outage, and how widespread it is, and I'm still waiting for a response. I emailed my questions, so in fairness, if their servers are down, or spotty, chances are they haven't gotten it. As soon as we get an update, we'll pass it along — or if you have one to share, send it along.
Questions? Comments?
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes