Picwing Blog

On Friday, May 08, 2009 at 2:00pm, Twitter had about 2 hours of downtime. You might be thinking, “Great. What else is new? Twitter has downtime all the time”. Well this one was different in that it was scheduled downtime.

And during that downtime, people we’re talking about the downtime everywhere except, well, Twitter. For example:

• Techcrunch writes a post titled Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To do. It receives 111 comments.
• Techcrunch writes a second post on the downtime titled Twitter And FriendFeed Battle For Downtime. Scoble’s Head Explodes.
• Shortly after Twitter comes back up, everyone is tweeting about how they had an anxiety attack (@ClareOBrien), a productive day (@christoff), or just express plain anger (@golda).

Now I’m no conspiracy theorist, but something about the timing of the downtime sounds fishy. In fact, I would venture to say that I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if twitter deliberately scheduled the downtime in the middle of the day.

Here are my reasons:

• Captain of the Obvious: Typically, downtimes are schedule during off-peak hours, like late in the evenings or on the weekends, not in the middle of the day. At least with Picwing we try to schedule any maintenance work after 10pm. Now I know that the workers at twitter need to have a life and not be at work in the middle of the night. However, to that I say that twitter is still a relatively small startup company, and as such, it wouldn’t have been a far cry to ask them to stay late one day.
• There’s no such thing as bad press: Through their downtime, twitter got everyone talking about them. Whether denial, anger, depression, boredom, or happiness, people were spewing their emotions to other people. Perhaps as a result, people who had never used twitter before will check it out to see what the commotion was all about.
• Twitter knows we need them: And they want to remind us of that cold, hard fact. Twitter has reached a point where its users are so hooked to the service that they won’t lose them because of some downtime. For the same reason your girlfriend sometimes gives the silent treatment to you, Twitter turned off their servers to remind how important they are to us.
• We want what we can’t have: Because twitter was down, we wanted it even more. I myself found myself hitting the refresh button like Skinner’s pigeon (Maybe that’s why twitter’s logo is a bird??). It reminded me of the days when GMail was open to invitees only, and as a result, gmail invites were going for as high as $100. Obviously, not anyone can pull this sort of thing off. But twitter definitely can.

Now I’m not saying that the people at Twitter simply turned off their servers, twiddled their thumbs, and then turned it back on 2 hours later. I’m sure they had some work to do. But it does seem to me that the time was picked deliberately as a marketing ploy. I’m not saying its a bad thing. I think it’s a genius move on their part, but also a mean one. Dang you, twitter. I love/hate you.