Twitter has been having a big heaping plate of issues served up with a side of fail-whale as of late. Many people know it, especially those that utilize the service for networking and marketing purposes. The micro-blogging service is being completely transparent about the issues and the generalized cause of the problem.

Sean Garrett of Twitter didn’t beat around the bush. In a short tweet he stated clearly: “From a stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October.”

For several weeks now, the micro-blogging platform has been experiencing a regular flow of errors bordering on constant. Downtime and glorious fail-whales continue to stack and the extended downtime this week is wearing thin with some users – especially with yesterdays elevated error rates.

In anticipation of the World Cup, Twitter has been working on reinforcing their architecture and improving the system but apparently it’s too little too late. A number of the Twitter team members have admitted that while there are underlying errors due to critical mistakes within the internal network, the primary cause is really the mass of activity surrounding the World Cup

That makes sense. Especially from a marketing standpoint where everyone and their brother is trying to leverage the World Cup to push products and services. Say hello Nike. It’s not surprising that Twitter is dealing with a mass in traffic but personally I feel like it should have been expected.

Twitter has had exponential growth in the last year that has caused its user base to swell, likely beyond capacity. While I’m certain they’ve had to work hard to keep up with their explosive population there should be some kind of anticipation of the activity to come around major events like the World Cup, Superbowl, The Stanley Cup Playoffs, The Olympics and the Rerelease of Pee Wee Herman movies. (ok I’m pushing it).

Unfortunately the issue is far from fixed, and Twitter will need to continue dropping service over the course of the next few weeks (approximately two) to perform maintenance and fix the internal architecture.

From a technology standpoint and the speed at which most coders and engineers work, that tells me that this isn’t a simple slap-and-tickle repair job. The question is, how will these downtime issues change the way people view the service? While there are few options for direct competition with Twitter that work just like Twitter does (there are other sites, don’t misunderstand me) there are a number of people that rely on Twitter for income and marketing, especially with local consumers.

For those that rely on the stability of Twitter, they will likely utilize other services as long as they can find their buyers and connections there (Facebook anyone?) That leads to a curious question of how likely people will be to return to Twitter when the network repairs are finished or how many are willing to sit and just ride it out.

We can’t neglect the effectiveness of brand loyalty.

What’s your take?

image source - edwheeler.deviantart.com

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