Twitter experienced 1.87 per cent downtime between 1 June and 15 June 2010 – representing a total of six hours and 44 minutes – compared with just 0.18 per cent for the whole of May, according to new research.The study, from website monitoring and load testing specialist, Site Confidence, found the micro-blogging site experienced two […]
Twitter experienced 1.87 per cent downtime between 1 June and 15 June 2010 – representing a total of six hours and 44 minutes – compared with just 0.18 per cent for the whole of May, according to new research.The study, from website monitoring and load testing specialist, Site Confidence, found the micro-blogging site experienced two hours and 20 minutes of downtime on 16 June 2010 alone.
This represented its poorest day for availability since the beginning of June. Twitter also experienced one hour and 41 minutes of downtime on 9 June and one hour and nine minutes on 14 June. The company admitted on its official blog yesterday that “from a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October”, pointing to downtime as a result of complex systems improvements as the cause of its recent poor performance.
17/06/2010
In the same blog post, Twitter also warned of further planned downtime: “Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification.”
Site Confidence’s research, which reviewed the performance of the micro-blogging site’s homepage, also noted that Twitter had an average download speed of 8.21 seconds between 1 June and 15 June, an improvement on the average of 8.93 seconds seen in May.
Bob Dowson, director at Site Confidence, said: “Twitter is playing an increasingly important role in how people access up to date information and news, particularly during major events like the World Cup. In turn, the company was aware of the potential for increased load and varying spikes in traffic yet has been unable to consistently meet demand in recent weeks.
“It is difficult for any company to foresee complications during routine maintenance, but it appears that Twitter left too little time to build in the necessary capacity to cope with increased traffic.
“Social media tools such as Twitter are inevitably susceptible to hikes in traffic due to both planned events, like the world cup, and breaking news – for which they cannot prepare. In turn, it is essential that these sites consider the necessary capacity to cope with planned events ahead of time and, based on previous experience, look at the potential impact a global news event could have on availability. This way, sites will avoid unnecessary downtime and increase user confidence.”
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