It has been a good while since twitter has had serious uptime issues. The last time it happened was...well....since this. Well - Twitter is up to its old tricks again. It isn't offline per say, but it might as well be. As others have pointed out Twitter has been having serious issues since Saturday, April 19th. The service has been online but has not been displaying tweets from some users on their followers' timelines.

I first noticed this about midday Saturday as I was at PodcampDC with my beautiful girlfriend, Steffanie, watchin Andy Carvin and Jim Long, of NPR & NBC respectivley, do a presentation on the power of twitter as a news gathering and conveying mechanism. I would estimate that PodcampDC has about 100 people in attendance. I would say about 30 of us were Twitter users. At various times during the day I would make tweets about PodcampDC happenings or see Andy or Jim use Twitter theirselves but their updates wouldn't hit my feed. I has a feeling in the back of my head that something was going on but was so preoccupied with the day's events that I didn't pay much attention to it. After the event was over with, Steff and I ran some errands & preoccupied ourselves for the rest of the day. It wasn't until the next day, Sunday, that I started seeing a few posts on Techmeme about it. This type of error we're seeing reminded me of the problems Twitter had several months back when people like Merlin Mann, Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis couldn't add people as friends OR have people see their updates. It seems that a lot of the people having messaging problems now are people with lots of followers. It seems like a potential database issue tied to accounts with large sql fields? Just guessing.

Anywho - I'm writing about this to help get the word out to my followers. As I make this post it will go out to Twitter. Hopefully those that are blissfully unaware of Twitter issues at the moment will see the title/link & read it and help spread the message. (Hi followers :)) In the meantime Twitter, the company, has remained mostly silent on this issue preferring to take the old corporate methodology to dealing with the problem - pretending it doesn't exist until they fix it. They did acknowledge the problem at their twitter status account but you only got the message if you follow them (which I didn't - as I didn't know the account existed until i saw another blogger write about it) and I doubt a lot of people got it even if they DID follow it, as that is the problem in the first place.

Consider yourself informed.