That’s right, Twitter is down. I’m sure most of you already noticed, reloading those lists and resending tweets to the left and right. Hopefully the downtime will be short, but it’s over 30 minutes already which is bad enough.
Update: Twitter is fighting a denial of service attack.
Twitter is back after the delayed planned maintenance, and they are now back online as most of you have probably noticed already. No problems have been reported, so we can assume that all went well. Meanwhile, the rescheduling of the planned maintenance of the service might in part have been influenced by the US State Department, according to a Reuters report. Biz Stone comments this in a blog post:
However, it’s important to note that the State Department does not have access to our decision making process. Nevertheless, we can both agree that the open exchange of information is a positive force in the word.
For more on Iran, see the #iranelection hashtag. Unconfirmed reports are coming in (via Twitter of course) that Iran is filtering out said hashtag, so you might want to try some other ones as well.
I haven’t read or seen anything that would point to Jaiku, the Finnish microblogging service that Google bought, suddenly growing like crazy, but maybe I’ve just missed it. Anyway, the servers have been down for almost 30 minutes now, alternating with “the server’s are too busy” messages, and the not so pretty “502 Bad Gateway” error. Most likely they’ll be back up soon.
Either way, is this as sign of things to come? If Jaiku should take off, would that mean that they’d go through the same downtime period as Twitter did? They really shouldn’t have to, especially if they would get integrated in the Google App engine as has been reported previously, although that one’s been under some fire recently as well.
All that aside, fact remains. Jaiku is still down, and we’re yet to see it become a serious threat to Twitter.
Six Apart has reported some downtime to their TypePad service, including the TypeKey, and also to the Vox blogging service. The downtime was reported at 11:28 PM PDT, and all the services seems to be back up at 12:08 AM PDT. The status page reports:
Midnight: A bad power supply in one of our core routers is preventing some TypePad blogs from displaying. We are onsite working to resolve the problem.
Everything should be working now. Did the outage affect you?
Gmail had some down time for a few hours recently, luckily something I just saw in passing since it was at night where I’m located. I’m a dedicated Gmail user and I get very annoyed when it is not accessible. I also think that it works well enough to replace a desktop mail client, and that makes me think that the “beta” mark on Gmail is ridiculous. But it is there, and for a reason. Google has issues with their e-mail service from time to time, and obviously don’t feel that it is ready to be released for real. Which I think is a bit scary, but obviously understandable. It makes it easier for people like me and Om Malik to accept the apology and continue labeling our inbox accordingly.
SiteMeter, the popular web statistics service, is having a huge issue at the moment. It appears that the statistics code will crash anyone visiting a site using SiteMeter with Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 or 7! That’s a whole lot of potential visitors getting “Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site” errors, and not OK of course. I’d expect people fleeing from SiteMeter now…
So what can you do if you’re a SiteMeter user? Well, remove the SiteMeter code, probably located in your site’s footer but that depends on where you put it of course. SiteMeter won’t be able to track your visitors when the code is removed, but on the other hand the people visiting your site will be able to actually see it… [Read more…]
