Twitter was not running at full capacity today. The Fail Whale had come out of retirement and the Twitterverse was being told that the microblogging platform was "over capacity…too many tweets! Twitter’s official blog states:"We are experiencing site availability issues — additional latency and errors — this morning. We’re working to address these issues."
Update: 9:32 AM PDT: To help stabilize the site, Twitter said, it is turning off some of the site’s features including, "but not limited to," Twitter Search, photo uploads, RSS feeds and HoverCards.
in what may be unrelated, Twitter announced Tuesday that it plans to start testing its own way of shortening Web site links posted by users to fit in the 140-character message limit. While various free services, such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com have been providing this functionality up till now, there has been issues with spammers using these shortened links to send those who click on them to phishing sites in order to obtain personal information or to trigger a computer virus.
Update: 10:57 AM PDT: It appears that the USS Twitter Enterprise is back on course, and "search" is once again available to users.
Update 2:25 PM PDT: Twitter is experiencing a recurrence of this
morning’s networking issue. They are investigating. Will keep you updated if this is a temporary or permanent fix!!! Way
to go, Fail Whale!
Update; June 11 – Mashable – What happened that caused this week’s Twitter issues, wrote engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti,
is that the engineering team made three critical mistakes:
- The
team put two important, fast-growing, high-bandwith components on the
same segment of Twitter’s internal network. - The network wasn’t
being monitored the way it should have been. - The internal
network was also temporarily misconfigured.
To ensure the
same mistakes aren’t repeated, Cozzatti continued to outline what
Twitter will be doing to fix the problem. He wrote that the company has
doubled the capacity of its internal network, improved how it’s
monitored and rebalanced its traffic.
