Fans and critics alike expected Twitter’s new “status” blog to be a busy place yesterday, and in one sense, the company didn’t disappoint. Posts mainly focused on preventative measures, however, and Twitter more or less made it through Apple’s big event without failing.
The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and Steve Jobs’s keynote in particular, has posed a problem for Twitter in the past. And so have any number of other occurrences, for that matter, making references to Twitter and downtime almost clichd.
Twitter Celebrates Lack Of Outages
But yesterday, Biz Stone, the company’s co-founder and creative director, wrote on its main blog, “It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%.”
Stone also promised that Twitter’s accomplishment wasn’t a lucky, one-time shot. “[W]e learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line,” he stated.
Any additional Twitter outages still aren’t likely to cause the level of surprise generated by Amazon’s recent problems. The company did well yesterday, though, so an acknowledgement of its improvement seems appropriate.
