Twitter Warns Of Increased Outages

Twitter says record traffic has contributed to more than five hours of downtime this month on the micro-blogging site and is warning users that the next few weeks will be "rocky" as engineers try to solve a number of technical problems.

Twitter acknowledged in a blog post that in terms of site stability and service outages, June is on track to be one of the site's worst months since August 2009. In trying to fix the technical issues, the site has uncovered "unexpected deeper issues" that have caused recent outages and will take time to correct.

In trying to correct the problems, Twitter expects a "rocky few weeks."

"Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage," the site said Tuesday.

A major contributor to the traffic spike is the month-long World Cup soccer competition, which started June 11. While Twitter believed it was ready for the expected increase in traffic, "what we didn't anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event."

Even before the World Cup, traffic on Twitter was booming. In May, users posted nearly 2 billion tweets, or 64 million a day, according to Web site metrics firm Pingdom. Tweets are short messages that Twitter users broadcast to friends, family, and other followers.

So far this month, Twitter has suffered almost five and half hours of downtime and large bursts of errors, which have lowered its average June uptime to 98.55%, according to Pingdom. By comparison, the site's uptime in May was 99.77%, when it suffered only an hour and 40 minutes of downtime.

Over the next couple of weeks, Twitter plans to perform relatively short planned maintenance that will likely force the company to take down its service. "We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification," the site said.

Twitter has a status blog where it posts real-time updates on site outages.