Of All The Times For Twitter To Go Down …

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Twitter just released the news that COO Dick Costolo will be replacing Evan Williams as its new CEO, a #newtwitterceo announcement which was marked ironically and perhaps inauspiciously by a total Twitter crash and a proliferation of fail whales.

So what to do instead of tweeting about the company’s new hire? Well TweetAlternative seems to be broken as well but Status.net, a twitter clone that you can run yourself and therefore are not subject to a central point of failure, is still up and ready for your updates. Those interested in moving past the fail whales can sign up for a free hosted account on the Status.net servers, or read our post on “Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To Do” or just be patient.

Update: Twitter is back up! Ladies and gentlemen, resume your tweeting.  Side note: While Status.net updates syndicate to Twitter through their API, it seems as though updates posted during this particular break were lost instead of queued up like they should have been.

Update 2: Twitter Communications VP Sean Garrett apparently OHs Costolo (humorously, above) on the site’s downtime. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams has not yet tweeted about the staff changes, perhaps because he is still busy fighting product fires.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

→ Learn more

Dick Costolo is the founder of Feedburner which was acquired by Google in 2007. He is currently the CEO of Twitter. He has also performed in Chicago’s Annoyance Theater and various improv shows and festivals.

→ Learn more

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus