Tag Outage

I’m sure you heard the news! Twitter was DOWN!? Denial of Service attack which crippled Twitter, LJ, Facebook and more!

re: Serious Twitter Outage Ongoing, Denial Of Service Attack (Updated)

What really affected me in this outrage are all the poor countless souls who lost their lives as a result of this dramatic service outage.

Yes, you know what I’m talking about.  

All the poor helpless plants which expect their owners to water them when they tweet.   What if you were on life support and the only means of informing a nurse you needed food, antibiotics or pain reducers was twitter? YOU’D BE DEAD TOO!

Next time you think about Twitter, it’s more than just a communication medium.  It is a lifeline for the very beings who provide us clean oxygen in this world! My Oak Tree out front twitters me regularly, though he keeps retweeting Guy Kawasaki so I’m not sure what’s up with that!

If a cloud falls from the sky and it is in pre-release tech preview, will anyone notice?

Apparently, the answer is a resounding Yes.

(Repost from Microsoft Cloud has an Azureism)

This past weekend, the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform “Windows Azure” appeared to have gotten caught up in the currents of a storm.  And like many storms, it’s not understood what happened, why it was down and after 22 hours was able to be recovered from.    Not exactly the feeling that many within the Cloud community are feeling as a great success, though in Microsoft’s defense – they are in Pre-Tech Preview, and while there is no worse time for something like this to happen; it is equally no better time as it’s not a fully released “product” yet.

Fortunately during this situation there was complete transparency of what was going on communicated by Steve Marx.

This is a very sore point for Microsofties with the MIX conference this week, but nonetheless this is indicative of past Microsoft Performance, so it is not as if it brings any shock or feelings of strangeness.   For anyone with a history of solid Microsoft Performance, it tends to involve pretty severe hiccups before settling into a hearty solid nesting period where it’s hard to penetrate or get an upper hand on it.

For those not familiar with the Microsoft Azure Services Platform, here is a breakdown:

Other links on this subject:

Azure Services Outage 3/13/2009 – A Brief History

22-Hour Outage for Windows Azure

Microsoft Azure Goes Dark For 22 Hours

Today, Twitter offered an explanation of the Deletions issues a number of Twitter users have been experiencing: Updates on deletions

Status deletion has been re-enabled.

User restoration has also been re-enabled.

User deletion remains off as it still represents a significant problem for the stability of the service. In the past several months, we’ve had to turn off user deletion many times in order to keep things running smoothly. Each time we turned it back on, we’d hoped we had sufficiently patched the existing system to prevent it from being a problem.

We’ve now concluded that the user deletion system needs to be rewritten and we’ve started that effort. Until we finish, user deletion will remain off. There’s a number of places throughout the site where we will need to message this better. We’ll be making those changes as well.

Certainly, this is a concerning issue, only one of which plagues the frequent twitter users in the tweetosphere.   Without any knowledge of exactly how they’re handling the routines for handling user deletion, aging, and load experienced on the system I could only offer the briefest of a question of how it is being addressed with suggestions.

We’ll see if the Tweetosphere continues to suffer from Performance issues such as this, and the frequent Site Outages experienced throughout the week.  Always raising the question and concern of have they properly accounted for the scale of this volume and the user communities peaks and valleys for system load.

I’ll keep my eye on it, but here is your word from the Twitter itself! @cxi – Christopher Kusek