So, the days of being constantly treated to the image of the soulful Twitter fail whale are in the past. The main trending topic regarding Twitter isn’t so often pointing to “is Twitter down?” and, for the most part, social media addicts who savor each and every tweet are getting down to the business of tweeting rather than complaining about not being able to tweet.
However, it appears that the up-time capabilities of this micro-blogging service still isn’t anywhere near where it should be according to CheckMySite.com (global up-time monitoring service). And CheckMySite.com isn’t the only one that has noticed this ongoing up-time issue. In 2008, Pingdom named Twitter as one of the worst performing social media sites.
To tackle this issue, Twitter turned to its outsourced managed hosting company, NTT America, which provides IT and data services backed by a Tier 1 global Internet backbone. NTT responded to Twitter’s issues by leasing out a 15,000 square foot data center located in Santa Clara, California. The idea behind this was to better serve the rapidly growing customer base who were also screaming for a better micro-blogging service. Did it do the job?
Apparently not. A quick check of charts and statistics provided by CheckMySite.com shows that the Twitter service hovers somewhere around the 99.7 percent area. The service does seem to be improving recently as, for the month of November, Pingdom shows the service holding fairly steady at the 99.99 percent mark with only 3 total minutes of downtime.
Where do competitors Facebook and MySpace rank in as far as total up-time? One hundred percent. Though, it seems to me that the one hundred percent mark is a bit off as no service is completely without at least one period of downtime and Facebook is notorious for its own maintenance updates which often affect the service (though the main web site remains up and running). The point is, however, that Twitter’s peers are performing at a higher rate despite Twitter’s data center move.
Clearly the issue lays with the increased popularity of the service and the style of social media it delivers. In the past year alone, Twitter has grown from over 3 million users to just a bit over 23 million. Where Facebook and MySpace deliver a multiple of social media applications rolled into one web site, they don’t deliver real-time micro-blogging services as the main thrust of their business. Twitter does and it’s the only service they deliver.
Trying to keep up with an ever-increasing customer base as well as consistently delivering thousands of tweets every minute has to take a toll somewhere. And, for now it appears, this toll is taken on the service’s up-time.
