Don't look now, but Twitter may have harpooned its "fail whale" - well, at least for now.
During October 2010, the site measured its lowest downtime since Pingdom began monitoring the site in February 2007, with just ten minutes of downtime, or 99.7 percent uptime. Twitter representatives could not be reached for comment.
In those 43 months, Twitter achieved "three nines" - or above 99.9 percent - reliability on just six occasions.
For years, the Twitter "fail whale" has been the bane of the microblogging service's existence, surfacing on numerous occasions. On the other hand, the iconic whale image has not only prompted its own fan page, but its own Twitter group.
At the company's Chirp conference in April, Twitter executives said that they had made significant changes to the site's infrastructure. Twitter has minimized HTTP 500 errors by two-thirds, executives said then, and and cut tweet delivery failures by two orders of magnitude by rewriting services, Williams said. The team has also written a tool called "Murder," – a reference to crows – to cut transfer time to push updates to its vast array of servers by using BitTorrent.
In June, however, site outages plagued the site again, with over 10.5 hours of downtime, or 98.5 percent reliability. Twitter attributed the outages to "system-side issues.
And the site has also suffered numerous glitches that have also affected the site's experience, if not its performance, including issues with mentions and timeline features. Twitter executives have said that they hope to be able to "degrade gracefully," turning off features before site issues take down the site itself.
For now, the outlook for October is auspicious, however: the site has been down for 21 minutes, for a total of 99.88 percent reliability.
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