Twitter Outage 2010: The Day the Tweets Died
March 18, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke
March 18, 2010 – Last night, at around 11:05 PM EST, as I was literally in mid-tweet, Twitter went down. No, I’m not talking about a bad gateway, the inability to establish a secure connection, or a routine “Whale Fail.” This time, it crashed hard and with an audible, virtual thud.
Immediately, I blamed Tweetie 2, but to my dismay Echofon, Tweetdeck, and HootSuite all refused to let me in on the conversation.. With a sense of impending doom, I opened Safari and said a silent prayer to the Twitter Gods asking that the mobile version would somehow grant me access to twitterary goodness, but, alas, it was not to be. The only thing I achieved was coming face to face with a little white whale, who looked no happier than me.
From there, I popped over to Mashable because, if anyone would have an intern on duty to post the tech news at that hour, it would be them. Sure enough, they had a link to the official Twitter status page on which was posted: “We’re investigating a general site outage since about 8:03pm PDT.” That was it-short, sweet, and to the point. Every twerpson in all of Twerpville was without tweets.
So what happened then, in this riveting drama that could only be characterized as a T.V. movie waiting to be produced? Well, for me, nothing really happened at all. I set my iPhone on the night stand and watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Other than that, nothing happened at all. My thumbs did not shrivel up and fall off, due to lack of use. I did not miss some crucial piece of information that altered the course of my entire life. I may have missed out on some interesting conversation time (because my followers are the best), but I still had a home, a family, and a comfortable life. My virtual life came to a blue screen of death-like halt, but my real life was still there.
Does that mean I didn’t check again, after a while, to see if the problem had been resolved? Of course it doesn’t. As I’m fond of saying, “I’m a geek. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.” Around 11:35 PM EST, I gave Tweetie 2 another chance, and, this time, it came back up. After 30 excruciatingly long minutes, order was restored to the Twitterverse.
There are a couple of things we social media afficionados (Read: Twitter Addicts) should take away from this. These periodic outages are annoying, but they are not life-threatening. They don’t involve the destruction of our homes, loss of our jobs, or any other potentially life-changing occurrence. Though these types of outages may get reported on CNN, that, in and of itself, does not make it newsworthy. Twitter and other social media tools and platforms are part of our lives, but they are not our entire lives.
So, just like any good IT department has a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) for the network, you, too, should have one for your real life. When Twitter, your internet connection, or whatever other connectivity-dependent device goes down, implement your personal COOP.
Your COOP measures can include reading a real “paper-filled” book, taking a walk, playing with your kids, or simply talking to your wife, husband, or significant other. These things are real and define you. Your virtual you simply compliments the real you. It’s important to remember not to confuse the two. After all, that’s what Geek Shui is really all about isn’t it?
