Twitter Outage

Twitter is down this morning. So far, it has been down for 58 minutes in August and I think all of that is this single outage, longer than any I can remember with the service. Over the last six months, Pingdom reports uptime of 99.79% for Twitter, but any outage seems like a long time. Our emergency management people view Twitter as a critical component for their public communications. Unfortunately, there is rarely a failproof communications method, that is why we have backups and alternatives.

Update (8:12 am MDT): outage is now an hour and 5 minutes.

According to the latest update (8:49 am MDT) Twitter is defending against a denial of service attack. Apparenty, this attack has had some impact on other services, including Facebook.