Twitter experiences another flutter

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

May 21, 2008, 11:24 AM

In an environment predicated upon all users updating as frequently as possible, social microblog Twitter has revealed its hamartia: that it can absolutely not sustain downtime.

Granted, the service experienced numerous outages in the course of two weeks -- to say nothing of the past few months -- but in combing through the Twitter support forum under the heading "May 20: Twitter Downtime," it becomes apparent that every time the site experiences a service disruption, users are left stranded.

Twitter rep Jason Goldman attempted to calm the grumbling users: "Essentially what has been happening is that we've been trying to make changes in order to improve the long-term reliability of the service. Those changes have introduced instability in the short-term, however."

In the social media realm, however, quality of service is not the determining factor for success; it's user base. The more people start using Twitter, the more entrenched it becomes, downtime or not.

Still, the site's persistent outages have some looking for solutions through decentralization.