Among social media and network types of websites, Twitter spent over 37 hours away from the Internet and the service’s users.
As fans of Twitter know, the site can be subject to maddening downtime. When big news happens and lots of people start tweeting, Twitter experiences spikes.
Those tend to be followed by outages, ones that likely led to a shakeup at the service over the past month. Two of Twitter’s top tech types left the company, a development that’s difficult to cast as coincidence in the wake of outages in the early part of 2008.
The Royal Pingdom blog said social sites monitored by the Pingdom service experienced varying amounts of downtime from January through April of 2008. MySpace fared the best, giving up a mere 65 minutes to downtime issues.
Twitter enjoyed a comparatively lengthy break. Its downtime over the four-month period hit 37 hours and 16 minutes. It’s nearly a week off from the day job.
Reunion.com’s nearly 19 hours offline looks like a blip in comparison. That was good enough for second place in the outage department, followed by relative newcomer Pownce, and AOL’s social media acquisition, Bebo.
The whole issue of services in the cloud may be all the rage these days. But the smart kids building these services have little knowledge of the time when client/server apps were a business fixture, yielding to the desktop model over time.
Not being able to tweet for a few hours may be inconvenient, but some tech firms want to convince companies that cloud computing of networked services is the way to go for some of their business needs.
It’s a nice idea, but not one that has been borne out by the performance of the Internet in the US anyway. Outages happen, if not at the hosting facility then at a point in between. Downtime will always be a grey cloud drifting on the computing horizon, with customers hoping it doesn’t rain on them.
