The Latest Twitter Dust-up
Looks like there’s more drama in Twitterville – between service problems and other issues – it’s been an interesting week for the the gang at Twitter.
What happened?
Well, earlier this week, Twitter called out their users for being part of the problem with the service.
Scoble didn’t care much for that comment and said so:
A business that blames its best users is one that’s in trouble. Serious trouble.
It’s so sad to watch a business make so many bad decisions like this one is doing. Right now a pretty significant part of Twitter is down. Track isn’t on. IM isn’t on. Other parts of the service are giving me tons of whale photos that say something is technically wrong. It’s so sad because I really want to use this service to keep in touch with my friends and fans and family and enemies and all that. They all were on Twitter. Now? On FriendFeed alone I now have 11,566 followers (a large percentage of which joined in past two weeks). There is a migration underway, although most people say “I really want to be on Twitter” even after trying out competitive services like Pownce, FriendFeed, and Jaiku.
Scoble then recording part of the discussion into an interview that you can now view on qik.com.
In the meantime, Mike Arrington has a few harder-hitting questions:
* Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
* Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?
* Is it true that the only way you can keep Twitter alive is to have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail?
* Is that why most of your major outages can be traced to periods of time when former Chief Architect/server watcher Blaine Cook was there to sit and monitor the system?
* Given the record-beating outages Twitter saw in May after Cook was dismissed, is anyone there capable of keeping Twitter live?
* How long will it be until you are able to undo the damage Cook has caused to Twitter and the community?
With stories like this on a weekend – who really needs Twitter? Just read the bitchmeme…
