What’s Next Now

Yes, it appears Twitter had an outage last night.  And it was duly reported by Robin Wauters at Techcrunch, which is all well and good, but I have to take issue with her final update on the situation after it had been resolved.

Twitter’s Constant Stream Of Update Messages Suddenly Grinds To A Halt

Lucky for Twitter this happened on a weekend during the night (at least U.S. time) so most users won’t have even noticed. But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.

This is just absurd.  Computer systems rarely go without glitches, particularly those that are scaling up. Think about all the times your paid services have been down.  If you spend any significant amount of time connected to the Internet, you’re familiar with outages.  The only time in recent years that I’ve found any outage to be unacceptable was when I was without my (former) main email account with Netidentity for two days.  And then a couple of months later it happened again. From what was reported, that the outages happened during upgrades, it was beyond unacceptable. That’s failing to plan ahead, plain and simple.  Inexcusable.

My point?  It is no more dangerous to rely on free services than it is to rely on paid services.  The only difference is that when it’s free, you don’t get to call customer service and complain.  That’s all.  In the case of Twitter, does anyone really think that its staff – and its investors – consider up-time any less important than the staff at your cable or telephone company?  Really?

When supposedly smart folks dole out horrible advice or commentary about anything to do with social media, I feel it’s important to point it out.

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