Twitter: Worst Downtime for Social Networks
Pingdom has a report looking at the uptime performance of major social media sites. The worst performer, not surprisingly, was Twitter. The microblogging service, whose reliability problems have been a hot topic in the blogosphere, has been offline for more than 37 hours this year - twice as long as the outage total for the next-worst site. Twitter was the only service with uptime below 99 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum are the two largest social networks. MySpace had the best overall uptime at 99.96 percent, while Facebook was close behind at 99.91 percent. MySpace had just 1 hour and 5 minutes of downtime in the four-month tracking period, compared to 2 hours and 29 minutes for Facebook.
The strong performance of MySpace and Facebook was likely helped by the fact that they now have deeper pockets to invest in industrial-strength Internet infrastructure.
Facebook is now supported by 10,000 web servers and is expanding its infrastructure with major leases of new data center space from DuPont Fabros (DFT) in Ashburn, Virginia and Digital Realty Trust (DLR) in Santa Clara, Calif.
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By Rich Miller 
May 06, 2008 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail
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Comments
This article sheds a little light to the importance of continuous uptime, particularly in a space like social networking that commands fast and around-the-clock availability. Although Mr. Miller mentions that the strong performance of MySpace and Facebook was likely due to heavier investments in Internet infrastructure, it’s worth considering a solution that is able to proactively identify, resolve and prevent outages from occurring could result in significant cost savings for Twitter, which could then be used to further improve its infrastructure.
Posted by: Scott Turkow at May 9, 2008 07:41 PM