Many of us have become extremely dependent on certain online sources–Google and Twitter, to name the most prominent–for our daily work and personal lives. And so when not one, but both of these services are on the blink at the same time, it becomes news.
First, there was the slowness of Gmail and related Google applications, a problem that seemed to be worse in the early morning hours. A Google blogger issued an explanation for the slowness of Google apps. All due to a “traffic jam” in which data was routed through Asia, apparently.
Marc Farley over at StorageRap had this to say about this outage:
“Anytime this sort of thing happens, questions come up about whether or not cloud computing is ready for prime time. The answer is – of course it is, but maybe not at Google.”
Meanwhile, Twitter appears to have been down at times both today and yesterday, expanding beyond its pre-stated outage at noon PT. A quick Twitter post explained it, though it implies that the service was only down for seven minutes–not what several were reporting. In light of yesterday’s debacle regarding the “replies” feature, Twitter seems to be getting into hot water more often than not these days.
In response, someone tweeted about this: it’s called “Down or is it Just Me” and seems a useful tool. My suggestion is that you bookmark it, just to be sure it’s handy. Nothing like old-style web technology when things are feeling shaky.
In the big picture, we still don’t know what this means. It could just be a strange and/or cosmic coincidence. Or, it could obviously be a sign that, as some have suggested, the pace of growth of these highly successful services is proving too hard on the infrastructure they’ve built.
Twitter, for example, has been far more virally successful than anyone envisaged. The news today was that Oprah has surpassed 1 million followers. To accommodate this amount of activity–and who wants to bet that at least three-quarters of them were new to Twitter?–can’t be within its normal scope of operations. Oprah, as we know, has been the source of many a server crash over the years. Then there’s storage. At this point, Twitter must surely have multi-petabytes on disk, not to mention a skyrocketing growth rate.
Time will tell how these mega-popular services will manage their growth. One possibility is that with just a few more outages, the fickle user base will migrate to something else before the problem becomes too severe. FriendFeed seems to be the new geek platform of choice–though for now at least, it’s being used in coordination with Twitter by most of the users I follow. Or perhaps something even newer and shinier will strike our fancy.
