Feb 11, 2009

Why Twitter went down today?

Today(Feb11, 09) Twitter went down in the middle of a busy work day. This outage was for an hr or so...The important thing is that just yesterday there was a news about Twitter planning to charge companies to generate revenue. Then it went down because of an infrastructure issue. How bad is the time...

As I blogged about earlier, the problem is that lot's of these web applications are built on top of 90's client/server infrastructure. Those infrastructure products can only scale on LAN but not on WAN.

This is like driving BMW on a dirt road. It doesn't matter how good is your car, your journey is going to be bad. ..

To answer my question, i don't think this outage is due to Twitter application problem. They are smart guys and know how to build scalable applications. It's because of an infrastructure component which failed them.