Twitter: another two weeks until it's fixed

It’s the Twitter addict’s worst nightmare: Twitter’s down AGAIN and all you want to do is blooming write a tweet about how that is the worst thing that has ever happened to you but you can’t.  FAIL.

It’s not just the horror of not being able to get on Twitter though and having to look at that whale again (can we reiterate The Wall’s call for the Win Penguin to get more of a look-in here?). Some people’s – I can hardly bear to type this, it’s so awful – Tweet counts are NOT SHOWING THE RIGHT NUMBER.

So what exactly is the problem? On the Twitter blog, the company says that it did anticipate there would be a huge spike in traffic during World Cup matches, so it’s not directly caused by that.

What Twitter is doing is tweaking the site to make sure it can stand up to huge volumes of traffic. It has, however, uncovered “unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes”.

It might be time to set up some kind of Facebook support group, because there’s more bad news: Twitter says that this is likely to go on for some time – another two weeks. The company is saying that there will be some planned service outages while it fixes the problems, which will be outlined on its Status Blog (you can still visit that even while the Twitter fail whale is doing its thing).

The good news is that Twitter won’t be doing it during any World Cup games. Also, it says that the tweaks will make the service more stable in the future.

Sarcasm aside, Twitter has become an integral part of some people’s marketing strategies and the service outages are probably a major headache if you’re trying to run some kind of a competition or get a topic trending. But it’s unsurprising that all of this is getting done before Promoted Tweets are rolled out, when Twitter’s earning money for providing all of these amazing services.

It’s also interesting to note how Twitter is pretty apologetic in its tone. They’d really be well within their rights to point out that no one is paying for this (and it’s meant to be a bit of fun, isn’t it?), but instead they take a pretty contrite tone in their communications with users. Unless this is sarcasm so subtle that I’m missing it: