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April 20, 2008 8:31 AM PDT

Twitter hiccups through a semi-outage

by Jonathan Skillings

The Twitter community may not be paying much heed to your posts this weekend, but it's not your fault.

The company behind the messaging service and Web 2.0 darling acknowledged late Saturday that some back-end changes had been failing to show tweets from a number of people. A post on the Twitter site from a person identified as "goldtoe, Official Rep," had this to say:

This is a result of some of the caching changes we made during last night's maintenance window. While those changes have made the service more stable over all, there have been some unintended effects.

We're aware of the problem and are working through it. It may take a bit to resolve but we are on it.

Twitter outage (Credit: ParisLemon.com)

The post--which has a box noting that "106 people have this problem"--went on to say that "this solves the problem," but goldtoe some hours later updated things: "Just to be clear - we know the problem is not yet fixed. We still have work to do."

Some Twitter users on the forum indicated that they had been able to find workarounds, but others continued to report posts going MIA.

Outside Twitter itself, the outages got some attention from blogger MG Siegler on his ParisLemon site:

I noticed a few people thinking the same thing as me today: is everyone taking a break from Twitter? People do get burnt out from the web after all and it was a pretty nice weekend day in a lot of cities. But no, Twitter is broken. People are updating and most of the updates are simply not coming through.

Click on some of your friends' profiles. You'll see they have updates, yet those updates are probably not in your Twitter stream. But some are, making things even more confusing, and making it harder for people to tell that Twitter is broken.

Jonathan Skillings is managing editor of CNET News, based in the Boston bureau. He's been with CNET since 2000, after a decade in tech journalism at the IDG News Service, PC Week, and an AS/400 magazine. He's also been a soldier and a schoolteacher. E-mail Jon.
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Where is @acomputerpro ???
by G. J. Goldwyn April 20, 2008 12:47 PM PDT
I guess I have the privileged of being in the elite 106 affected by the Twitter "outage." Grr!

I'm thinking this outage is affecting Twittererz with a large following. That's my professional opinion.

-gj (acomputerpro)
Reply to this comment
going MIA
by Karl Viklund April 21, 2008 12:20 PM PDT
So. I supposed to know what MIA means...
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@Buzzillions having withdrawals from Scobel
by Buzzillions April 21, 2008 9:57 PM PDT
I've used Twitter for about one week and was already addicted to @Scobleizer and his ten tweets a minute habit. Tweets are so tasty!
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