Right to reply: Twitter outages present opportunity to rivals
- Added:
- Jun 17, 2010
Twitter's persistent and disruptive service outages have entered a second week, with tweets appearing numerous times this morning after a period of downtime Nick Bond, Infrastructure specialist at web traffic management specialist Zeus Technology, looks at the implications for the social media community.
The huge of amount of coverage generated when organisations suffer downtime highlights how many people rely on online services day-to-day.
The rise in popularity of sites like Twitter itself also means it doesn’t take long for the world to know when a site is experiencing an outage.
Although not all outages can be planned for, brands can take simple steps to ensure services do not collapse under the weight of peaks in demand.
For example, software solutions that offer organisations a cost effective means to monitor and manage traffic to websites are readily available and avoid the need for additional expensive hardware.
Twitter’s running commentary on a variety of issues requires consistent uptime under this volume of posts, where all messages appear at the time of posting. Where individuals and businesses tweet more, they will come to rely on the system as a more reliable form of communication that has the measures in place to cope with busy periods.
What is certain is that there will be numerous competing social networks waiting to be the next big Twitter should the platform’s downtime ever cause of too much frustration to its users.
By Nick Bond
Infrastructure specialist
Zeus Technology
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