(Inspired by a conversation this morning w/ @tjeffrey at Hook)
So if you’re reading this blog, I’m pretty damn positive that you noticed that Twitter and Facebook went down the other day. Funny how many forget (or just don’t know) that something just like the “Social Media Apocalypse” of 8/09 used to happen literally every week on Twitter.
And while the outage was relatively minor, there were ripple effects that went beyond people’s inability to tweet about their breakfast or to RT some social media link-bait.
Take a look at CPB’s new site. What happens when Twitter goes down? Is it really acceptable to lose 1/3 of your website’s content? And they’re not the only agency/company to rely on a 3rd party feed. I think that pulling in content from other places is great, but now you’ve got to worry about the stability of other sites.
Not that any of this is wrong. Just another thing to think about.
2 Responses and Counting...
Great observation Matt. You should check out this post on distributed social networking – http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_a_perfe... which is tangentially related to your point
Do you really believe it was Denial of service attack? I think most of us have caused this by insisting to refresh pages that failed to load
http://status.twitter.com/post/157191978/ongoin...
We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
Update (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.