GigaOM » Fail Whale

Twitter acquires Crashlytics team for mobile app development

Eliza Kern — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 22:43:07 +0000

Twitter and the Cambridge-based startup Crashlytics have announced that they’re joining forces, bringing the team that has helped other startups test their mobile versions for potential bugs and crashes into the fold at Twitter.

Crashlytics wrote on the company blog Monday about their plans for mobile app development in tandem with Twitter:

We built Crashlytics to deliver the world’s most powerful and lightest-weight crash reporting solution. With us, developers gain instant visibility into the precise line of code that caused a crash, enabling them to more easily fix issues. Since our iOS launch, we’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of incredible app developers, from those building independent passion-projects to many of the top iOS apps available today – Twitter, Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze, to name just a few.

Going forward, we’re thrilled to work with the incredible team at Twitter. We share a passion for innovating on mobile and building world-class applications. Joining forces will accelerate our build-out, allowing us to leverage Twitter’s infrastructure to deliver new features faster than ever.

The Crashlytics team hails from Cambridge, and the Boston Globe profiled the company in April 2012, where the founders discussed their motivation for starting the company to help other startups understand what was causing crashes on mobile. Presumably Crashlytics will be working on Twitter’s mobile app to improve performance, which is crucial as Twitter tries to improve reliability and scales out the company going forward.

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Twitter experiences connectivity issues on Inauguration Day

Eliza Kern — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 23:10:45 +0000

Twitter is experiencing outages on Monday, with some users reporting difficulty accessing tweets and a variety of Twitter apps, and the company posted to its blog that its engineers are working on a fix. Some users are also experiencing trouble with redirects and t.co links, or links shortened by Twitter, which is problematic for anyone sharing links through the site.

Update: Twitter posted that it had resolved the problem around 10 PM PST on Monday.

Twitter experienced serious outages and “fail whale” instances earlier in its history, but it moved to its own data centers in 2011 and has worked to minimize those issues, which tend to cause a strong reaction on the part of users.

The reported outage comes on Inauguration Day, when the company’s @gov account reported that it had 1.1 million inauguration-related tweets coming during the ceremony. In contrast, Twitter saw approximately 82,000 inauguration-related tweets in 2009, back when the company was still relatively new. Here’s the chart the company provided of tweets this year in comparison to 2009.

Update: As of 5 PM PST, Twitter was still experiencing connectivity issues and the company’s status page had not changed. Users were still having difficulty with t.co links, which means even if the site was back up, they might still have trouble clicking links and accessing information.

Update: Around 5:40 PM PST, the company noted on its support account that it was still working the problem:

Our Help Center is currently down. We will send an update when the issues have been resolved.—
(@Support) January 22, 2013

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Twitter Out For Next Few Hours

Om Malik — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:20:44 +0000

Twitter’s fail whale is back in action, which means the must have Internet service for chattering classes is down for the count. A company spokesperson said that the service has suffered an outage and won’t be back before 3 am PST. “We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from a failed enhancement of the site,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this.” For further updates, you can check out the Twitter status blog. Feel free to vent your anger in the comments section — I am calling it a night!