When Twitter Goes Down... oh, how we have come to rely on it

If you are a Twitter user, you are no doubt by now aware that there is a serious problem. Annoyingly, it's not a catastrophic failure... it's far more subtle than that. The site looks like it is fully operational. You can post tweets. You even get some tweets from people you follow.

But that's the issue... you get some of the tweets in your twitter stream, but very definitely NOT all. As now noted on the Twitter site, some maintenance they did this weekend to improve caching obviously didn't work:

Oops.

The problem, of course, is that for those of us who have integrated Twitter into our regular workflow, it has become part and parcel of how we communicate. I liked what the folks at Mashable said:

Why the hysteria? Well, Twitter seems to have become more than a service. It’s a new way of communication. You simply cannot replace it with anything; what are you gonna do, get all your Twitter friends to become your friends on ICQ? That steady stream of freshly baked, human-created (well, some of it is bots) info is the information junkie’s bread and butter.

Indeed it is more than simply a service. Here's hoping that they get it working again soon.

P.S. Several writers have pointed out that we might actually be more productive today without Twitter around to potentially distract us. On one level that might be true... but on the other level Twitter users might be distracted in checking to see if the service is back up! :-)

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[Bryan Person, BryanPerson.com]

Count me among those who kept checking Twitter throughout the day yesterday in hopes that the missing tweets would be found -- and who also decided that it was worth staying up past my bedtime to blog about my frustration with yet another technical glitch with Twitter: