When Things Go Wrong - Twitter and TinyURL

Unless we employ redundant tools, we can be damaged by the failure of one of our favorite tools.

There have been a couple of service failures over the last few days that have affected portions of the online community.

Let's start with Twitter, as of November 15 (Dave Winer):

It's pretty clear that Twitter has been down for a couple of hours (as of 6:10PM). It's also clear that it's become an integral part of communication for some of us, I'm one of those people.

But people adjusted, as Robert Scoble noted:

I was wondering why I was answering so many emails today. Hmmm.

But we still love it, as Jason Calcanis notes:

Twitter is like the EBAY of Web 2.0... down all the time and people just deal with it. That says something about how much folks love the brand. That being said, Twitter needs to just spend the money and hire more engineers and buy more servers.

But as of yesterday, everyone was wonderful and the @[name] linking feature worked. Well, it worked if you weren't using a mobile device.

While I can work around that, I can't work around a non-operational TinyURL. Steve Rubel comments:

TinyURL, a free and extremely popular five-year-old web service that shortens URLs and is a staple of tools like Twitter, has suffered some brief downtime lately. It's down as of this writing....

As a result, some are starting to imagine what might happen if such a single point of failure should go down for an extended period of time or, worse, shut down or be acquired. Twitter is far from the only company using the TinyURL API service.

The thought of an evaporating TinyURL - a wonderful tool that remind you is provided to us all for free - especially considering its rising popularity is all more than a little bit frightening, yet fascinating.

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