Twitter Warns Even More Downtime To Come

Following two rough weeks of buggy service, Twitter warned its users that more downtime should be expected over the next two weeks. The outages affecting Twitter have been the worst since last October, said Sean Garett, the company's head of communications.

So far this month, Twitter has been down for 5 hours and 22 minutes, a total uptime of 98.54 percent, according to Pingdom, a Web performance monitoring company. In October 2009 Twitter had 1 hour and 10 minutes of downtime (99.84 percent), according to the same statistics.

The notorious Twitter "fail whale" has affected both the service's Web site and third-party desktop and mobile applications, and the company said on its official blog that it is making adjustments to avoid outages during the World Cup.

Twitter says the problem behind the outages lies with record traffic experienced during the World Cup, and also with maintenance work to its network gone wrong, which it has detailed last week on its Engineering Blog.

"We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic," Garett wrote on the Twitter blog. "Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games."

Next to downtime, Twitter has also had problems in the last 24 hours with their tweet counts and experienced missing or duplicate tweets from their timelines. To fix this issue, Twitter recommended to repeatedly refresh your browser.

Despite the technical difficulties it is experiencing, Twitter introduced on Monday a new feature called Twitter Places, which allows users to tag messages with specific places via its new geolocation system.

Are you relying on Twitter for various forms of communication? Should the company be more efficient at resolving the downtime problems? Sound off in the comments.

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