By Albert N. Milliron, Editor, Politisite & Iron Mill News Service
Many of us in the micro-blogging world have come to a standstill. I got my cup of coffee, lit up a cigarette, and went to my favorite rss feeds to see what the released political news of the day would be.
Finding some excellent potential posts for my twitter acco
unt @politisite and @ironmillns, I fired up my Tweet Deck to begin my daily routine of posting. WHAT!!! twitter is down. How am I to communicate with the world at large? How can the politicos of the world live with out my posts? (I am a bit grandiose until the third cup of coffee.) So I checked around and I am not the only micro-blogger in turmoil. I thought of Obama for a moment that this is a crisis that could lead to catastrophe and what is the conspiratorial left has disabled the right leaners from posting anymore line by line attacks on H.R. 3200? Maybe I have been turned in to the White House as a contributor of false and misleading information about Obama Care. Ahhh. Its not just me, my paranoid has left me, The Huff Post and the Daily Kos are in the same twitter state. Now thats what I call a even playing filed. Twitter is reporting that it is experincing an ongoing Denial of Service Attack and is working on the issue.
So what to do in the meantime? Drink more coffee, constantly hit the refresh bar on my computer until I can put out my daily links to my 2600 followers. They need me.. or maybe I need them.
Until then here are a few other micro-bloggers that woke up in the same state of mind.
The world came to a standstill Thursday morning, when the Twitter short messaging service went offline for at least an hour. Not really — but Twitter is in fact offline this morning, and we’re working on figuring out why.
Are they integrating the bit.ly URL shortening service at a deeper level? Does this have something to do with Paula Abdul? Or is the site just down for routine maintenance?
So far, we’ve confirmed the Twitter outage in two boroughs of New York, and have received word that the service is down in Brazil as well. The Twitter status blog says “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”
We were only partially joking above, about the world coming to a standstill due to Twitter being offline. The service has become an integral part of the communications ecosystem — our first question was, how do you confirm Twitter is down without Twitter? — and from its millions of inveterate users, we expect an outpouring of pent-up Tweeting when this gets sorted out. An extended outage could have an impact on the spread of information — videos, music, and articles like this one — to say nothing of a growing number of businesses which depend on the service
via Twitter Down, No Explanation Yet | Epicenter | Wired.com.
Can’t Tweet the bears
I don’t know, but my efforts to tweet from the dorm room have been stifled by struggling technology. Perhaps the site will be up and chirping by the time this post is done.
Reports coming out of San Diego now are that Philip Rivers and the San Diego Chargers could begin talking about a new contract for him soon. Rivers is believed to have been waiting for Eli Manning to strike. Although Manning has a Super Bowl title to his credit, and that’s what it is all about, Rivers’ statistics over the course of their careers are far superior. Don’t think for a second there is any reason other than that for his delay in getting to the bargaining table.
via Getting by without Twitter; Could Olsen be up for extension too? – Inside the Bears.
Mashable has No Answers
Twitter is currently experiencing extended downtime: a 30 minute outage that’s one of the longest in recent months. Back in 2007 and 2008, Twitter downtime was relatively frequent: this year the site has been far more stable and its early outages have been largely forgotten.
In the last 5 minutes, Twitter has acknowledged the downtime on its status blog, but adds that it’s unsure of the cause:
Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.
We can’t help noticing, however, the top trending topics right before the downtime. Meanwhile, over 90 Twitter refugees have joined our “Twitter is down” thread on Facebook
News from Twitter Status
Ongoing denial-of-service attack 43 minutes ago
We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
via Twitter Status.