Does the World Still Need Twitter?

From WebPro News

Twitter users know that the service goes down fairly often, but that doesn't seem to alienate them. While Twitter has certainly had its issues with user retention in the past, it continues to grow. Last month, the sitegrew by nearly 10% (over the previous month) by our estimates, with total registered users estimated at 122 million. That's not Facebook-like numbers, but it's pretty significant. One almost has to wonder if those numbers would be higher if the "Fail Whale" didn't make so many appearances. Twitter users, for the most part, don't seem to mind him too much though. 

The Downtime

Frequent downtime is nothing new for Twitter. It's been going on pretty much as long as Twitter's been around. You would think that by now, they'd have it under control, but no such luck. 

The latest post on the Twitter status blog from just today says, "We're currently experiencing a high rate of errors (whales) on Twitter.com. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are responding to the incident. One from Monday night talks about site availability issues. This is a pretty common theme on the blog. June 9th..."site availability issues". June 8th...site availability issues...May 5th..."site largely unavailable. April 22nd..."elevated errors." April 20th..."high error rate." April 12th...."high error rate." April 5th..."general site outage." March 25th..."high error rate." You get the idea. This is all scattered among posts about missing tweets, missing follower counts, and other issues. And I'm pretty sure there has not been a corresponding update every time I've personally seen the Fail Whale. 

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