Skip to content

Twitter outage disrupts flow of news and information

Twitter is down

Twitter went down for two to three hours yesterday, the second outage in less than a month. The issue arose when, as shared at Huffington Post by Raphael Satter (@razhael), one data center failed and another that was to provide redundancy also failed. I’ve come to recognize that technology is not perfect, there are failures.

The impact of Twitter failing for a few hours is more than most folks may think. 40 to 50 million tweets are kicked out in a few hours. Recipients of those ‘would be tweets’numbered in the hundreds of millions. The subject of many of those tweets was solid news and information, not only from mainstream media, but also from citizen journalists covering niche topics we could never have imagined being covered a few years ago.

Sure, you could turn on the radio, watch the TV, turn to news websites and blogs, and your RSS feeds in attempt to stay current during this twitter outage. But those things, as strange as it seams, are no longer routinely used by many people — especially people who move news and information, the influencers and amplifiers. Influencers and amplifiers turn to Twitter.

Imagine, God forbid, we had a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a terrorist attack during that three hours. The world’s ability to stay current in the absence of Twitter would be severely hampered.

From Alexander Furnas (@alexanderfurnas) in his piece in The Atlantic on When Twitter Stumbles

Thankfully, the world can survive for a few hours without data for targeting ads. Twitter is not so deeply imbedded in the infrastructure of our lives so as to make this a catastrophic event. But what if it were? For example, Ushahidi, a real-time crisis-mapping platform has been successfully deployed to record violence in Kenya and the Congo, and to help target aid resources during the 2010 Haitian and Chilean Earthquakes. Ushahidi allows people to report on the ground conditions by collaboratively updating a map by posting from Twitter, among other platforms. Had Twitter gone done during a crisis of this type, it may have meant far more than lost ad revenue or me having that anomic feeling of being unable to share my every thought.

I know we got along fine without Twitter for decades and centuries. But that was when we did not not expect to get news and info in a second from whomever was ‘on location,’ whether they were a reporter or not. That was before people relied on others they trust, many of whom they follow on Twitter, for news and information to be shared with them, as opposed to relying on the mainstream media.

For those of you who do not use Twitter, you may not understand what I am talking about — or think that I’m nuts. But for many of us, there was a strange feeling of the news being down during Yesterday’s Twitter outage.

Posted in: