It’s 10am EST and Twitter has been down since about 9:15 or so. What is one to do? Surely Facebook will be the natural alternative, but who wants to limit their pondering to just one social networking outlet?

By coincidence, I was just reading a post on Read Write Web on the potential dangers od cloud computing. How many businesses suffer when the king of 140 characters goes down? Would anyone care if MySpace went down?

These are the questions of our times. A highly-aware society with our fingers on the pulse of the news. We can’t wait for any offical confirmation. If it comes up as a trending topic on Twitter, it must be true! Now, we have to wallow in the alternative universe of actual news sites… What are we? Barbarians?

Just checked again, 10:08am, Twitter still down…

Now I would not consider myself a major Twitter user. I’m more of the follower type and I like to read what people post, but I only tweet every so often. But now that it’s down, 1/3 of my computer screen is useless. Could be worse I suppose. It’s not like the Internet went down.

What responsiblity does a cloud computing site have to the people who build a business around it? I’d imagine advocates of paper-ballot voting are pointing their fingers right now going “See! I told you this technology stuff is unreliable!”.

10:14am… still no good.

As a communication professional, you have to seriously consider how a online service going down will effect your brand/sales/advertising. We used to just worry about keeping our site up 99.9% of the time. Now with potential ties to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and dozens of others, you could be in serious trouble. What about the ad agency that sold you on the idea of a social networking-integrated campaign? Are they responsible for their recommendation? Do you have a contest running? If so, do you now have to extend the deadline? How long will this go on???

10:19am… nada.

So this all works out to be a nice wake up call on cloud computing. Sure, I still believe it’s the future of computing in general, but maybe it’s time to make a back-up copy of my contacts from LinkedIn (You can export them from the bottom of your Contacts page, by the way). The only problem Twitter had is unbelievable success, now they have to try and sure up the foundation so we can all get back to sharing our thoughts with all those who are willing to listen.

10:25am… nope.

If you are really put out by this, you can read TechCrunch’s Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To Do. Or read a book. At least I got a blog post out of it…

10:31am… Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Doug Crissman Says:
   August 6th, 2009 at 11:05 am

   Very poignant thoughts. In searching about this twitter issue, I found some other interesting sites –
   just funny:
   http://whentwitterisdown.com/

   informative:
   http://status.twitter.com/post/157160617/site-is-down
   http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

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