It’s been a tough couple of weeks for social media’s rising star — and it looks like it’s going to get even tougher as Twitter expects service outages to continue. From a site-stability and service-outage perspective, June has been Twitter’s worst month since last October — and the light at the end of the social-media tunnel is weeks ahead as the World Cup and other factors are causing traffic to spike, apparently faster than Twitter can get resources in place to deal with it.
“We’re working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we’re facing record traffic,” said Sean Garrett, vice president of communications at Twitter. “We have long-term solutions that we are working toward, but in the meantime we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.”
Good News, Bad News
That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: Garrett said Twitter engineers have uncovered “unexpected deeper issues” and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of attempts to make changes.
Ultimately, Garrett said, the changes that Twitter is undergoing will make the micro-blogging site much more reliable. In the meantime, all he can do is apologize: “We certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.”
Some believe Twitter should have already had resources in place to deal with the growing traffic. The social-media industry’s golden child is answering that this way: “Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage.”
According to Garrett, Twitter was aware of the likely impact of the World Cup, but didn’t anticipate some of the complexities that come with fixing and optimizing its systems before and during the global event.
Twitter’s…