What Do India and Twitter Have in Common? Service Outages

Twitter and India may want to hire the same quality assurance outfit.

According to Techcrunch, Twitter has 500 million users, of which the tech news site says 170 million are active. One of the drawbacks of Twitter as a means of communications is that the service is sometimes down — completely. Twitter went entirely off line earlier this month.

As the New York Times pointed out:

The timing couldn’t be worse for Twitter, which is preparing to compete with Facebook to play host to the online conversation around the 2012 Olympics, which will begin on Friday in London.

In India, the outage was a much larger problem for customers who use electricity. Some 600 million people were in the dark today, after a catastrophe took down the system that served 300 million yesterday.

Twitter or India?

Douglas A. McIntyre