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Twitter outage ongoing : Surviving in an unconnected world

Twitter has been down for an extended time, since about 6 AM PT, with no word from Twitter’s status blog how long it will be before Twitter’s back up or the cause of the outage.

Interesting how something I didn’t use a year ago is now something I can’t live without. It’s like I’ve lost my connection with the outside world. How do I share news and info on blogs, social media, and client development I’m picking up on my feeds this morning with all of you?

A lot of legal professionals see no use in Twitter, viewing it a waste of time. For them a Twitter outage means more productivity in America.

For me and thousands of other legal professionals who have found Twitter an effective way to foster meaningful relationships with clients, prospective clients, and referral sources as well as the influencers of those three, we’re losing client development time. Oh well, I’m sure there was a time when the phone system went down for extended times.

As noted by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch this morning, Twitter’s overcome early reliability problems.

Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform.

I don’t expect long term service reliability issues with Twitter. Fred Wilson whose VC firm is backing Twitter, speaking to an event I attended a few weeks, made clear Twitter is using its money on infrastructure to scale growth. Fred explained, and I agree, it made more sense now to grow the heck out of Twitter than to build software systems to generate revenue.

Proof of Twitter’s infrastructure spending is Twitter and Twitter search running lightening fast of late on the Amazon cloud.

First morning ferry ride commute without Tweeting news and updates in a very long time just coming to an end. I’ve survived.