I’ve become a bit of a twitterholic over the last month or so, and update my twitter page frequently with updates that don’t belong here or on Crunchnotes. I’ve suffered through a slow and sometimes down site without complaint – they’re growing like a weed and need some time to stabilize.
But then my account was deleted. My last post before the deletion was directed at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams – “@ev never, never, never say that. never.” I was responding to a jab he was taking at Apple products.
I noticed that I couldn’t log in and assumed the service was simply down. But it went on for days and no one else was complaining. So I emailed to ask what the issue was, and they were able to restore the account. no data seems to be lost.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says they haven’t received any other messages about deleted accounts. He alse says
It appears that during a routine backup, your index was somehow misplaced or not copied correctly which is why it resulted in a “404 – Not Found” error. Once you emailed me, we found your updates in the database right where they should be and corrected the error.
There were zero reports of 404 pages like this aside from yours so while we’re not 100% certain it looks to have been just the sort of error 404 pages were born to handle. Upgrades and/or maintenance we were doing on the same day was thought to be unrelated when I asked the rest of the team about this.
So there’s no conspiracy, it’s just the growing pains of a very popular service.
I’m not saying a word about scalability and Ruby On Rails, either. But as one of (or the) largest Ruby on Rails applications on the web, a lot of people are keeping an eye on how it scales.