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.