Well that didn’t take long. Over the past 24 hours, Twitter has been steadily rolling out its new Lists feature to a bunch of new users. Yesterday, about 25% of Twitter saw them, today, it’s much higher. Or it was. Shortly, Lists will temporarily go offline for everyone, product lead Nick Kallen has just tweeted out.
Don’t worry, the lists you just spent hours curating are not being deleted, but your access to them is being disabled for a bit. The reason is that there are already performance issues cropping up, so Twitter is taking “30 minutes or so” to investigate, as Kallen puts it.
This is not good timing for Listorious, which just a few minutes ago rolled out its site based around Lists since it felt enough people finally had access to the feature.
The reason Twitter has been slowly rolling Lists out rather than giving it to everyone at once is so they could stress test it. Well, here’s that stress. Still, I suppose this intentional downtime is preferable to Lists simply not working when they look like they should be. Also, feature downtime is much better than overall Twitter downtime.
Update: And they’re back, and opening it to even more users now. Over 50% of users should now see it, according to Kallen, who also explained that during the downtime they learned that Lists were not the cause of the issue.
