Goodbye Fail Whale: Twitter Dramatically Increases Reliability
For a while, Twitter's reliability issues were a running joke in the blogosphere, with Twitter's iconic Fail Whale appearing on anything from tatoos to t-shirts. According to the latest update from Twitter, however, the service had an uptime of 99.88% in August. As Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone points out, Twitter is working diligently to improve the service's reliability. So far, those efforts seem to be working out quite well for the popular microblogging service. During August, Twitter was only down for about 1 hour, while in June, the service was unavailable for more than 11 hours.
As Royal Pingdom notes, Twitter also managed to stabilize the load time of the site in the last few months. While May and June showed lots of erratic movements, August remained completely flat.
Clearly, some of the recent hires and acquisitions have worked out very well for Twitter. As Jack Dorsey notes in the latest update on the Twitter blog, Twitter has finally achieved a point where the team is not just constantly fighting brush fires. Instead, the team is now finally able to, as Dorsey puts it, 'craft' solutions features.
Looking at the latest stats from Compete, it seems Twitter is still growing at a nice clip, which makes the fact that the team has been able to stabilize the system an even greater achievement.
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just as i was reading this, and went over to twitter. I saw the fail whale :) .. guess twitter is in love with it!
Posted by: Nishant
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September 3, 2008 11:57 AM
Congrats to the Twitter team for making the product much more scalable!
Posted by: JungleG
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September 3, 2008 12:08 PM
We were so quick to blast them when they were down. Here's a Whoot for their progress.
I see the FailWhale a few times a week, but refreshing the page makes her disapear. If with this 'max clients' rule, they achieve more stability, i'm ok with it.
Posted by: Alex Barredo
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September 3, 2008 12:18 PM
The way I see it is that they have 100% downtime on IM services and are still wasting time sending out bullshit newsletters.
-- MV
"Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." - Teh Twitter Fail Whale
( Just wait until the Steve Jobs keynote on 9/9 we will see our happy aqua and red friend again. If not then just wait until Obvious releases the new version, currently in private beta testing )
Could it be that several people left Twitter after the cancellation of their SMS-service? All of a sudden, Identi.ca moved from feature poor, to feature rich.