If Twitter thought it had an overload problem July 26, the day before the London Olympiad begins, just wait until the opening ceremonies start and all those photos of the Queen, Sting and Paul McCartney begin saturating the Internet.
Slow responses or outages in the social messaging network for up to two hours were reported all over the world July 26, including North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.
The lengths of the outages varied on the types of devices; devices running Twitter’s mobile app or the aggregator Tweetdeck seemed to have shorter timeouts, compared with regular Websites on desktop and laptop machines.
A Twitter spokesman posted the following announcement at 9:30 a.m. PT time: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.” About two hours later, at 11:40 a.m. PT, Twitter said it had fixed the problem. It did not go into detail about what caused the outages.
Twitter wasn’t the only Internet network affected by the outage. The Google Talk and Google Mail cloud applications also were reported down intermittently, with Talk going down at 3:40 a.m. PT July 26. Affected users were able to access Google Talk, but were seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior, Google said on its apps dashboard page.
It took Google about five hours to solve the problem. A Google spokesperson posted the following at 8:25 a.m. Pacific on the Google Apps Dashboard: “The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
The Web monitoring site DownRightNow reported that Google’s email app experienced an outage from about the same time Google Talk went down (3:30 a.m. Pacific) until about 6 a.m. Pacific, then sputtered with intermittent outages for several hours thereafter.