It's Kill Feature Time Again At Twitter To Stay Afloat

Twitter has a history of killing off features in order to stay up. And it looks like it had to do that again today, in the wake the avalanche of tweets that are flowing in following Michael Jackson’s death. Gone are Search and Trending Topics from logged-in Twitter account main pages.

It’s probably not that tweets that are so bad for Twitter right now, it’s the searching for tweets to get information about not just Michael Jackson’s passing, but also Farah Fawcett’s and Ed McMahon’s. Plus there’s a whole trend of celebrity deaths being erroneously reported that probably isn’t helping Twitter too much either.

Twitter says the features are “temporarily disabled,” but then links to a blog post on a site that is also apparently down.

For anyone who has seen the new Pixar movie, Up, this reminds me of the scene where they have to throw stuff out of the house to make it float again.

Update: Okay, the post is up now. Here’s what it says:

We’ve had to temporarily disable search results from the logged-in homepage of twitter.com (this includes the saved searches and trends shown in the sidebar). We’re working on the underlying problem and will bring back these features as soon as we can.

You can still search Twitter and see the latest trends at search.twitter.com.

Update 2: And after about 4 hours away, the features are back. The fact that it’s now 2:30 AM on the east coast of the U.S. probably helped relieve some of the load.