Twitter had a rough day yesterday. For many users, the tweetosphere worked only intermittently throughout the day and for others, well, they were nary a tweet. Now, logging into Twitter and seeing a temporary fail whale isn’t uncommon, but large scale service outages like this one are rare. When they do occur, they shine light on a serious problem. One of the highest purposes of Twitter is that it enables the real time distribution of news about events that are important to specific communities of interest, but not large enough to be covered by traditional media like TV, Radio, and Wire Services. When Twitter fails, it shuts off thousands of dedicated, live news feeds to literally millions of people. So instead of asking why Twitter crashed, let’s ask ourselves the following: as we become more dependent on technology, should we spend some quality time crafting ways to protect ourselves against single points of failure?
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