“Twitter Over Capacity”: What it Means and What to Do

Using the Twitter Status link (http://status.twitter.com) is pretty funny. If the site is down completely then the Status page is going to be blank until it updates. That doesn’t help anyone. I am not a heavy Tweeter, I use it to keep in touch with friends, hear about local last minute events and follow a couple sports teams. I do know people who use the site for promoting events, networking and marketing their brand; for them a Twitter outage is the equivalent of a losing your internet connection.

What’s your alternative? If you want to send out a message anyway (not that anyone will be able to read it until the site comes back up) you can text your message to 40404 if you already have your cell phone number linked to your account. There’s no guarantee that the message will actually make it on to the timeline but when this has happened in the past all my text-posted messages have been on the feed. Setting up the 40404 direct posting from phone option is nice, if you don’t want to log in to the site from your phone or can’t get to your laptop you can send a direct message to Twitter. The downside to this is that if you don’t spelling someone’s username correctly they won’t see it. Using the Twitter app on your iPhone, Droid or iPod Touch allows you to have the same control over posting as you would from the website.

One thing that can prolong the outage is people hitting the refresh button thinking that it is just a minor hiccup. If you see one of the “over capacity” messages chances are it will only last for a couple minutes but when you see the “currently down for maintenance” message, it might be a couple hours of waiting. Since a lot of people rely on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates on news, sports scores, lunch trucks and other events it leads to a lot of refreshing of pages and when there is even a temporary outage or internet congestion it makes it worse. There have been some major service outages in the past but most of the recent ones (in the past six months) have been fifteen minutes or less.

With more and more people joining and using Twitter there is an increased chance of a service outage; Twitter needs to improve its handling and posting methods to prevent an overload. Likewise, the more Twitter grows the more attractive it gets for hackers and ‘bombers’ (those who try to cripple the system with massive amount of posts at a set time over numerous networks). Twitter password leaks are few and far between but when a link is passed around that hijacks accounts and sends out private messages, it causes some major problems with site congestion. Be sure to check your account settings from time to time to see which apps have authorization to be connected to it.

Using the 40404 option to post to your account is one of the best ways to stay connected, even more so if you get texts to your phone when you get an “@” message from someone. This is a nice feature to use when there is trouble in your area but there is nothing wrong with the site as a whole. You do need to set up the mobile portion of your Twitter account before you can use it, your mobile phone number is never posted or revealed when you send a text from your phone but standard texting rates apply if you are not on an unlimited plan.