Viewing Twitter’s Current Status

Twitter puts the fun in funky and the hip in friendship, but it can also sometimes put the ugh in ugly. I'm talking here about Twitter's occasional reliability problems. Twitter's original infrastructure wasn't built to handle the massive amounts of traffic it now bears, so every so often there will be a hiccup, a glitch, or even an outright failure.

These failures arise when Twitter's server simply gets overloaded, so it can't process any new data until some processing power is freed up. You know this is the case when you try to do something

on Twitter and you see, instead, the infamous fail whale, shown in figure 1.2.

 
1.2 If Twitter gets overwhelmed by updates, the impossible-not-to-love fail whale shows up to let you know.

The good news is that the fail whale's moment on the stage is almost always mercifully brief, so you should be able to continue what you were doing in a few seconds or, at most, a few minutes. You'll also be happy to know that our friend the fail whale shows up far less often than he (she?) used to. Over the past few months, Twitter has made impressive strides in not only plugging the leaks but also shoring up the foundations, so the service is now more reliable than ever.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's 100% reliable (online, nothing is). The fail whale still drops by unannounced on occasion, but Twitter also suffers from other gremlins from time to time. For example, you might see the whimsically mysterious "Something is technically wrong" page, shown in figure 1 3, if Twitter blows the online equivalent of a gasket.

So it pays to keep on top of Twitter's current status. There are a couple of ways you can do this.

First, send your Web browser to http://status.twitter.com/ to open the Twitter Status page, which displays updates on Twitter woes and worries, as shown in figure 1.4.

1.3 If a wrench gets thrown into the Twitter works, you might see this page.

1.4 Drop by the Twitter Status page to keep an eye on Twitter's health.

 Alternatively, visit the @twitter account by checking out http://twitter.com/twitter, shown in figure 1 5.

Ideally, you should follow @twitter so you see the service updates automatically. See

Chapter 4 to learn how to follow folks on Twitter.

 
1.5 Check out the @twitter account for the latest updates on the Twitter service.

If you are wondering about the @ symbol that appears periodically through the book, know it's a kind of Twitter shorthand that means "the Twitterer with the

username." So @twitter means "the Twitterer with the username twitter."