About a half hour ago, Twitter acknowledged that many people are having trouble tweeting this afternoon due to an internal server error:
We’re looking into the cause of the 500 errors that are being seen by users on twitter.com. We’re also working on the posting problems that many people are running into when trying to create tweets.
Besides not being able to tweet, thousands of users are reporting having problems with nearly every aspect of the social site’s services: inability to tweet from third-party applications, inability to tweet from Twitter, and, in some cases, inability to merely load the Twitter site at all.
If it seems like Twitter is down all the time, you are not mistaken.
A quick glance at the Twitter Status blog reveals that, just four days ago, the site had to deal with some “unplanned downtime:”
We’re currently diagnosing the causes of an unplanned site outage that happened a few minutes ago. We are recovering from this issue now and apologize for the interruption in service.
Digging through older logs, one finds that at least three instances of internal problems occurred throughout September–and those were just the reported ones.
Quite frankly, if Twitter has any serious plans of competing with Facebook, these errors need to either happen much less frequently or they need to be resolved faster and more efficiently. With over 300 million active users, Facebook enjoys far less hiccups than its smaller competitor.
Having just closed a $1 billion round of fundraising, Twitter should probably prioritize the consistency of its site’s operations before delving into any new service adjustments and improvements. With Internet users, quality is key. Twitter users already enjoy the way the site works now, when it works, so Twitter should be working tirelessly to support the site’s foundations.
