Oh, dear. It’s done it now. Twitter was already known for experiencing an embarrassing amount of downtime, but the microblogging service crashed during the Macworld keynote, and users are not happy.
A key point in all this (and we’ll get to “all this” in another moment) is that Twitter’s leaders presumably knew Macworld was coming; while wildfires, oil spills, and other disasters can’t be anticipated, Steve Jobs’s keynote address occurs quite regularly. Twitter could have – and probably should have – prepared for extra traffic.
Nicholas Carlson wrote, “[M]y boss is at Macworld right now and he’s expecting Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to take the stage in a matter of minutes. Of course, you should be hearing about this from him in our liveblog of the event. But we used a Twitter embed. And it’s broken. And, depending on when you’re visiting the ‘Wag,’ it’s either not working or loading really slow. Break a leg, Jack!”
Duncan Riley, Adam Ostrow, Allen Stern, Rick Mahn, Matt Herzberger, and Jackie Danicki took note of the outage, as well. This is hardly the kind of publicity that a young and not entirely profitable company would want.
Oh, well. Guess we’ll see if the event has any effect on Twitter’s long-term popularity.
