It’s a strange occurrence when a particular service is used to broadcast its own failings, but this is exactly what happened last night as the term “Twitter is Over Capacity” was trending nationally. The microblogging service was experiencing problems, only working intermittently, with many users encountering the notorious fail whale.
A minimalist blog post from Twitter later explained that the glitch has been fixed:
Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.
This issue has now been resolved.
As trivial an issue as this may seem to some people, being unable to access your Twitter content and information can throw up some real life problems.
Here’s a true story. Last Friday I had a spare ticket to a concert and I found a buyer through Twitter who sent me her number via DM a few hours before the concert. If Twitter went down at this point and I didn’t have a way of accessing my tweets offline, then she’d be left standing outside the venue without a ticket waiting for a phone call, and I’d be left trying to find someone else to buy a ticket at very short notice – not a great situation for either of us.
Thankfully this was not the case, we met up without any problems (despite O2 doing its best to destroy her phone signal that evening!) and both had a great time at the concert. However, that is just one possible scenario in which not being able to view and search your tweets could have presented an actual real life problem.
If you want to take control of your Twitter account content, use SocialSafe to download all your tweets, DMs, @s, followers, following and more. Browse, search and export your data using the offline journal, and never be separated from your content – even when Twitter is down. To try SocialSafe for free, download the Twitter Trial now.
Well it hasn’t been resolved. I logged in to one account this morning, got a message to confirm my email, I changed it to an active account, and confirmed. At some point, my home page turned to plain html, no images, no interface, no way to logout or to Tweet. Another account, displays okay but no way to logout either, and can’t report someone for Spam. This has been going on since this morning.
Hi C Raymond, thank you for the comment.
Sorry to hear that you’re still experiencing difficulties with Twitter – let’s hope that your problems are now sorted!
From your comment it sounds like you have several Twitter accounts – have you considered using SocialSafe to backup all of these accounts? At the moment you can back up as many as 10 different accounts at the same time – how many do you have?
Right now you can experience the Twitter functionality of SocialSafe free with this 30 day trial: http://socialsafe.net/free-twitter
Let us know how you get on 🙂
Andy