Thoughts on Twitter’s growing pains

It amazes me that Twitter is having so many server issues lately.  I know the company has had to scale to an insane amount of users in a short period of time, but all of this downtime is really turning me off to the service. 

I joined Twitter way back when, and only started using it within the past month or so.  All of the downtime is just painful.  I’m talking the kind of pain that you get when your cell phone dies… you don’t know what to do with yourself!  I’d say I’ve checked the service twice today, and both times it’s been down.  Not only that, but think of the amount of third party applications out there that are bricks right now because the grand daddy is down!  I would imagine services like Twitter Vision that rely solely on the feed from Twitter are caching information just in case the service goes down.

At the beginning of February, Twitter decided to ditch its old web host and go with an Enterprise Hosting Solution at Verio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT America.  Apparently that’s not helping the situation as much as we had hoped.

Is Twitter growing too fast?  To this question, I’m going to have to say yes… but only as a user.  If I was a Twitter employee/owner, the growth would be bittersweet.  On one hand, it’s amazing to have millions of people stomping on your service 24x7; but on the other hand I know from experience that when you have server troubles, nobody is taking the heat more than you are. 

Maybe they attempting to reach their vision of being a “reliable global communication utility” too quickly?  I’m going to say so, because at this point, Twitter and “reliable” don’t go in the same sentence.  What do you think - should I keep using Twitter?

Feb 12, 2008