Twitter Leads Social Networks in Downtime, But Still Up Near 99%
A new report from Royal Pingdom reveals that Twitter unsurprisingly led social networks in downtime for the first four months of 2008 with a total of 37 hours and 16 minutes. The good news is that even with all that downtime, that's still a 98.72% uptime percentage for the first third of the year -- which isn't terrible. Can we really complain about a free service thats "only" up nearly 99% of the time?
The next closest social network on the list in terms of downtime was Reunion.com, which was down about half as long as Twitter. Pownce, a Twitter-like microblogging service from Digg founder Kevin Rose that added file sharing and group direct messages, also suffered more than its fair share of downtime over the first few months of the year. The social network that has suffered the fewest outages? MySpace -- just down 1 hour, 5 minutes so far this year.
Twitter wracked up the most downtime during the months of January and February, with 13 hours each. Interestingly, its best month was March, when a lot of people expected heavy tweeting from the SXSW festival would bring Twitter down. Both Twitter's lead architect and VP of engineering left the company last month, which many bloggers assume was in direct correlation to its infamous downtime issues.
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Oh boy, more Twitter bashing. Is Twitter the Britney Spears of geek blogs now? When readership needs a boost, just run yet another hate fest about Twitter?
Requests:
Do a satisfaction poll of Twitter users vs. the other social networks on the uptime list. Ask which one the like best.
Do a detailed Google search, tersely, for "I hate Twitter" and "I love Twitter". What's the ratio? My results show 3,600 for "hate" and 400,000+ for "love". I also notice the majority of "hate" is from click hungry blog authors.
Transparency - Of the entire Read Write Web staff, and I mean everyone, what percentage use Twitter? Then follow-up with "Will down time cause you to stop using Twitter?"
I'll admit that I don't know exactly how Pingdom gathers their data but it looks like they monitor HTTP/ICMP/SMTP connectivity. Which, ultimately, is meaningless in the world of web apps. Just because Twitter's website is "up" doesn't mean that the app is up and working as it should... Don't even get me started about MySpace. Sure.. the site may be up 99% of the time but far too often when I log in there, some app functionality is broken.
I am going to go out on a limb and say in public that I think a whole lot of people are being paid a whole lot of money to push Twitter.
Just about every blog that I read, from the small to the large, just can't seem to stop gushing about Twitter.
Twitter is ok...but it is not the best thing since sliced bread. The hype is truly overwhelming.
If my blog was pushed by everyone, as much as they are pushing Twitter on us, I would have the #1 blog in the world instead of the #2 blog in the world. (Ok I couldn't help myself)
Live From Las Vegas
(Where We Don't Believe In Sensless Hype)
The Masked Millionaire
Blogs keep publishing this data but it only a small part of the picture as Shawn pointed out. For example blogs running wordpess often show the classic error message 'error connecting to database' but this would still count as up if you ping the website. 37 hours and 16 minutes download time is actually the minimum downtime for twitter, the actual downtime will be much higher. The fact that the myspace homepage has a high uptime is probably due to the fact that they host the homepage and other not logged in pages on separate servers. When you log in and start using the site you will see error messages all the time.
@Todd: Actually, I think this post was the exact opposite of Twitter bashing.....
What is interesting is that MySpace is powered only by Microsoft technologies and it is maybe the one with the biggest traffic. I'm not sure for the all the other web sites but I think they are mostly using LAMP or RoR.
I'm not a fan of MySpace at all and I don't want to start a silly discussion between MS technologies vs LAMP or RoR. Those datas show that all those technologies can work pretty well or really badly.
But as it was said it could be interesting to have a comparison based on the load of each of those website putting only the time is not so relevant.
@Pierrick: Cold Fusion is a Microsoft product?
@fernando yes sorry I forgot this part but except to manage flash, it is Microsoft technologies.
Last.fm being so far down on the list surprises me. It seems as though they've had more downtime in the past few months than anytime since I joined over a year ago.
twitter may have the most downtime but, cmon we have to accept the fact that even though that's the case, a lot of people are still using twitter, we may whine, we may bash it but still, we stay :)