Twitter has been down this morning, which always gets addicts asking themselves two important questions: Whose fault is it? and How long does Twitter have to be down before it prompts a blogpost? (People smarter than me probably have a pre-written story so they can blog it before Twitter comes back up.)
The latest extended outage cast suspicion on Twitter newbie Bill Gates, characterised in last night's blog post as pulling in users like a black hole. But that seems a little unlikely, if only because the idea has been punted by the Daily Telegraph.
Twitter survived the arrival of Oprah, tweeting live on her TV show, and no Seattle nerd – not even Seattle's richest nerd – has Oprah's mass-market pulling power. (See my graph.)
Another theory was suggested in comments to TechCrunch's Twitter-is-down story, and posted by John Carnell at TechnicaVita. He wrote:
The last big event around 1 minute before the site failed was that an aftershock in Haiti measuring 6.1 had just struck. I think we might have just seen Twitter overloaded as that single fact was retweeted across the network.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself resorted to blaming innocent marine life*, as usual. Its status update said, simply:
We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Will we ever know the answer? If so, will anyone care?
The problem is that when Twitter is down, there's not much for some folk to do except write Twitter-is-down blog posts. However, Twitter being down means that there's no way to tweet those Twitter-is-down blog posts, and thus reach the only audience that gives a hoot. Not you, obv.
* See The Story of the Fail Whale at ReadWriteWeb
