Twitter issues mea culpa
I have to say I admire the folks at Twitter for the transparency they’re trying to provide into the nature of the ongoing outage debacles that have befallen the application of late.
According to a recent post on the Twitter Blog released Wednesday, May 21, 2008:
“We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.
We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on. We’ve definitely failed that aim this week.”
To me the wording of this entry reveals some very interesting insight into what’s going on at Twitter behind the scenes – and it reeks of desperation. This post comes from a company that is absolutely panicking about the downward spiral of discontent in which they’ve found themselves and are frantically trying to stop the slide.
First there is frustration – massive frustration – over what appears to be a completely mysterious, and equally high-profile problem. For despite the knowledge that users are demanding answers – now bordering on outright revolt and exodus – they have none to give. As a result Twitter is being forced to do the unthinkable, and publicly declare they have no idea what is going wrong.
In saying this the second theme of this post becomes clear: Damage Control. They know full well they are getting hammered from all sides about the ongoing outages and sluggish performance. They desperately need some good press, or indeed a reprieve of any kind in which users start to act a bit more understanding about what’s going on.
So they’ve been reduced to pleading for patience and are now effectively saying: “we know we’ve completely stuffed up, but we’re trying to fix it.”
Unfortunately for Twitter, the fact remains that, with each Twitter outage, the user feedback and tech coverage grows more and more viscerally damning. Despite its phenomenal usage and adoption rate, Twitter has got to be the toughest gig to be a part of in the online services market today.
It remains to be seen whether their pleads will be heard by the masses. Somehow, I doubt it.
Update: A perusal of many blog entries discussing Twitter’s post reveals that – contrary to my initial suspicions – people do appreciate the honesty coming out of the company. I must say I’m inclined to agree with them. It’s a hard thing to admit you’re still at square one with a big problem like this, but in doing just that Twitter seems to have earned back a degree of trust and understanding from some members of the community.
It’s a step in the right direction – even in the face of the ongoing problems.
References:
- “I have this graph on my screen all the time…” Twitter Blog, 21 May 2008
