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Carla Thornton

Growing pains: Twitter experiences glitches, but doesn't think SXSW is to blame

Carla Thornton03.20.2009
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Twitter appears to be experiencing more growing pains. Users and the service itself recently have reported a spate of problems including erroneous "over the follow limit" messages, missing updates and problems uploading JPEGs.

Twitter usage has surged this year as more people discover the service. During major events -- such as the presidential inauguration in January -- it has bogged down, although uptime has generally increased thanks to staff and infrastructure investments. 

As for the cause of the current glitches, some twitterers are attributing them to a system overload caused by heavy use at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.  

But Twitter cofounder Biz Stone today told The Standard that the festival probably wasn't to blame. "We don't point fingers at events for the most part as they need to be massive and global even to stand out in our activity logs," he said.

Stone added that he hadn't noticed the latest problems himself, but that "as Twitter grows and scales we do discover opportunities for subsystems to be improved."

Still, the strange behavior gives pause for thought. While it does not mean a great deal to lawyers using the service, do police departments really want to depend on Twitter to report traffic delays?

 

 


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