At the time of writing, Twitter is down.
Something is technically wrong.
In fact, it’s been down for about an hour.
There are no details yet as to what has gone wrong.
No blood has been spilt, life carries on, but for people and businesses for whom Twitter has become an integral part of their lives it certainly feels weird not having Twitter any more.
And it’s a healthy reminder that ‘availability’ is just as important as ‘confidentiality’ and ‘integrity’. If a service or data you rely upon is inaccessible, that’s a problem.
Me? I can get on with other work, but if Twitter was to stay down for an extended period of time that would be a nuisance.
Mostly I’m sad that Twitter doesn’t have a better sense of nostalgia. I would have loved to have seen a revival of the Fail Whale which we used to see so regularly in the early days of Twitter.
Could it be a cybercriminal act that has caused Twitter to (at least temporarily) collapse? Well, it’s possible I suppose.
But often times there will be a much duller technical explanation of human error, misconfiguration, and general SNAFU that can be blamed.
I guess we will know in the fullness of time.
You can follow me on Twitter at @gcluley, err… if it comes back.
Twitter, fritter, bitter, shitter
Leaving fwits all a titter
In our faces is Twitter a spitter
Time to be a Twitter quitter
Yes, I miss the good old Fail Whale!!
The outage is supposed to be global.
Let's hope for the best.
At a time like this our thoughts must be with all the journalists who have been forced to sit twiddling their thumbs while their prime source of "news" is unavailable, or even, horror of horrors, may have actually had to do some real journalism.
Now imagine if Facebook suffered the same fate… Everyone will have to, god forbid, do something else…
Oh what, there is also Snapchat, Instagram, etc… to cure their vices…
Thanks for the title, Graham. Of course we could argue that if Twitter is still down (don't know, didn't check as I don't use it) someone could potentially die. Then again, I want to say that there are deaths every minute (I don't know the period of time but certainly every day) so maybe someone did die – but obviously not because of Twitter going down. AND if it ever does happen then some organisation and/or some people (hopefully not 'society' as a whole although I wouldn't be surprised if that eventually happens considering the mass-obsession with the IoT) have placed far too much faith into technology (with not enough backup plans … about Twitter, that is because of course people don't have enough backup plans more generally).