Notice that everything’s seemed kind of unusually quiet in the blogosphere all day ? From lagging tweets to the emergence of the new “@anywhere boosh” blank screen (“Fail Whale without the Whale”) error, it seems to me at least like the sundry unspecified Twitter issues on the loose this morning and afternoon are actually CAUSING a slow news day. While the delay on the tweets was thankfully resolved a short while ago, users are still reporting the blank page error.
The problems are affecting both the website and clients. Some 3rd party client users are also noticing interesting tweet crawling errors and the clients crashing altogether, like this random cluster of tweets at the bottom of a Tweetdeck search for tweets from @Mediagazer performed by Atul Arora. It’s unclear if all the problems are related.
While Twitter says it’s working on fixing the issues and that the blank screen has only appeared for a small number of users but wouldn’t comment on any specific cause. It seems like, at least from the timing of complaints, that the situation is ongoing. I’m seeing reports coming from outlets as diverse and mainstream as The Washington Post and The Village Voice that something’s rotten in the state of Twitter. In fact I just got the screen image above while searching for tweets to include in this post. It’s not just you.
Update: Users are also pointing out that the “You can still access old Twitter for a limited time” link is now dead and redirecting here. Could these issues be preliminary signals of an impending move entirely over to New Twitter?
What is @anywhere boosh and why am I getting redirected there?—
Dave Winer (@davewiner) February 15, 2011
okkk when i just pressed 'home' on my twitter page it took me 2 a blank page called @anywhereboosh…—
Danielle (@danstar88) February 15, 2011
Sorry for the errant tweets, folks. The Twitter API and some filtering went awry. We're working on it but the flood should be over.—
(@paidContent) February 15, 2011
.@benkepes I agree, but a UX issue is solvable. TweetDeck is attempting it, what's to say Twitter itself won't follow soon too.—
Richard MacManus (@ricmacnz) February 15, 2011
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