Twitter and Joyent Split Amidst Downtime Travails

[TechCrunch]

According to Joyent’s corporate blog, the company stopped hosting Twitter late last night:

Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday’s posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate the opportunity we had to work with the talented folks at Twitter. It is a great service. We wish Twitter every continued success.

As I mentioned yesterday, Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it.

The news comes amidst frequent outage problems that have plagued Twitter. Just last night, Twitter went down again, this time for a “planned maintenance project” that went “far beyond [their] planned time window”. The service has also recently suffered downtime during the State of the Union and Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld.
Despite all of these problems, just yesterday both companies were showing strong support for each other on their respective blogs. Both wrote posts (here and here) describing how they were working together to prepare for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.
When reached over the phone, Joyent’s CEO David Young preferred not to comment on Twitter’s stability issues in particular. He did emphasize that Joyent has free infrastructure on standby should Twitter want to use it again. He also wished Twitter the best of luck, saying the team is amazed at their “great service”.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, responded to an email inquiry about the situation as such:

We’re still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.

With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night’s efforts, we’ll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.

Given that both companies are reluctant to go into details about the break-up, we’ll just have to see whether more information comes out in time.

More from TechCrunch...

[Jeff]

Twitter is a great service that I have come to use on a regular basis, but the frequent downtime is a major annoyance. If they don't get it under control soon, people are going to end up switching to Jaiku or Pownce.