Twitter's Downtime Isn't The Problem

There are numerous complaints about Twitter’s downtime, but that isn’t essentially why we complain.

Yesterday, Pingdom released a survey of social networks and their corresponding downtime and uptime percentages from January -April 08. Twitter led the pack in terms of downtime. However, Twitter also had 98.72% uptime, which Mashable told us is reason enough to stop whining.

However, what some are missing, and what has been echoed loudly when Twitter goes down is that not only is Twitter down, but Twitter fails to keep it’s users updated about why it’s down.

Twitter Leaves Its Users In The Dark

This is Twitter’s biggest problems for numerous reason. For one, users are being kept in the dark. I can’t give you one reason why Twitter ever goes down, nor can I name the last time I knew why Twitter was down. Their team is slow to update us on anything going on with Twitter and the Twitter blog itself is rarely updated. When it is, it’s not usually to address problems. Take the look at their blog and you’ll see only two of it’s latest posts were about it’s most recent downtime. However, Twitter started acting funny last night and I haven’t heard anything from the team.

Speculations = Bad Press For Twitter

Secondly, users are left to their own devices because they are in the dark about Twitter’s problems. This leads to a host of speculations and inaccurate rumors of what’s going on. Essentially, this becomes bad press for Twitter.

Mistrusting Twitter

In turn, it all leads to us not trusting Twitter or feeling that it’s unreliable. It can make us feel like they’re hiding something. Everyone knows Twitter needs therapy. However, no one ever know’s why. Users know Twitter needs help, but Twitter doesn’t ask. Instead, Twitter lets suspicions and mistrust for the product breed and manifest in the heart of its system.

This is also a reason why users have been flocking to Friendfeed in the meantime.

Just Ask For Help Twitter

communityIcon In retrospect, this is why users could care less about how much uptime Twitter may have (sorry Adam). This is why we whine. We pay so much more attention to the downtime because we don’t know what’s going on and also because it occurs so frequently. When Twitter goes down once, you can expect it to happen again pretty soon. It’s a sad cycle that not many have any clue about nor how to help Twitter fix the problem.