Twitter’s Downtime

03.29.07

How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it's unavailable? I have never engaged in sustained use of a web app that is down this much - I can imagine large numbers of other people just walk away and never come back. Everybody says Evan Williams has struck gold in this wildly succesful new service - but I'm sure he knows there's a real risk of that never proving true do to constant service problems. Good luck to the Twitter folks - I sure wish the site was up!


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4 Responses to “Twitter’s Downtime”

  1. Steve Says:
    March 29th, 2007 at

    Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it. How about the converse, though: Have you ever seen a service as successful as Twitter despite the amount of downtime that it has? I think it speaks volumes that, in only a couple of months, Evan Williams has been able to grow a significant and growing user base that not only uses the service regularly but is willing to deal with frequent unscheduled downtime and come back as soon as the site’s up again. And I’m sure that a lot of the people who were intrigued and left because of downtime will come back once they find out from someone who’s stuck with it that the performance has improved, which it eventually will.

  2. Marshall Says:
    March 29th, 2007 at

    Thanks for the optimisim Steve - you may well be right. Good to see Loopipes, btw, I’ll have to give the podcast a listen. Thanks for stopping by!

  3. links for 2007-03-30 « My Weblog Says:
    March 30th, 2007 at

    […] Marshall Kirkpatrick » Twitter’s Downtime (tags: twitter web20) […]

  4. Kelsey Ruger Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at

    I agree with Steve. The growth of Twitter has happened despite the problems. I am not really as concerned with the web site’s downtime as much as I am concerned with not being able to send updates from IM on my desktop or blackberry. I have never really been one to put updates in via the browser unless IM was unavailable. I think ultimately as the user base matures it will be important for people to be able to continue with ‘life as usual’ and still post updates. Tweetr and Twitter are good clients, but the real appeal of Twitter is being able to update when you are not tied to a computer.

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