Twitter Outage

Many Twitter users are experiencing a problem today – their timelines haven’t updated in hours and as of yet there’s been no word from Twitter HQ.

At 8.35 GMT (over six hours ago at the time of writing) new tweets dried up for me and (judging by a Twitter search) lots of other users.

Not all accounts are affected and even those who are can still happily tweet and see replies – still it’s a major problem and is crippling Twitter for many.

This is a familiar problem – Twitter has these glitches from time-to-time – but after six hours you’d have thought Twitter might have noticed and updated their Status Blog with a reassuring update that they were aware of the problem and were working on a solution. Alas no, they’re silent.

As Twitter becomes a utility for increasing numbers of people, it really can’t afford to be complacent with service faults. The fault may have emerged in the middle of a weekend night at Twitter HQ in California but do they not have 24-hour service engineers? If not, why not?