twitter fail blog

Twitter is awesome for getting the word out quickly. When anything happens anywhere in the world, someone is tweeting about it in real time. Often, this is many someones, and discussion, analysis, updates and followup of the event ripples rapidly through the twitterverse.

The old adage was “telephone, telegraph, tell a woman.” In increasing numbers, twitter is replacing the telephone, no one under 20 even knows what a telegraph machine is, and we’re all connected in some way to virtually every man, woman, child, adult… the rest of the world, with a tap on the keyboard in front of every one of us. In the George Orwell book, 1984, Big Brother was watching everyone and everything. That time is now – Big Brother is us. (When this becomes a meme, remember where you heard it first.)

Imagine what happens, when for even a moment, people are unable to tweet what they’re thinking, doing, seeing, or procrastinating against the second the urge hits them. They can’t reveal what they had for breakfast, how much they hate their boss, or what they think of the latest political propaganda.

The twitterverse falls apart.

Okay Lucy, we’re going to do some ‘splainin now: a 503 error typically happens for one of two reasons:

1. Twitter is down for maintenance. That’s probably not the issue here, because they have a habit of telling everyone when that’s going to happen, so they can avoid a bunch of messages like the ones above.

2. Twitter is overloaded.

In all likelihood, the problem is that twitter is overloaded. If so, posting all those messages saying twitter is overloaded just overloads twitter. Every time you post that message, you are part of the problem!

Here’s the thing. There’s about 100 people who work for twitter. They use twitter every day. They are on twitter all the time. If you are having a problem with twitter, chances are they are, too. Telling them the servers are overloaded is pretty much a waste of time and makes you look like an even bigger idiot.

This kind of thing used to happen all the time when we worked in radio. Radio stations have all kinds of equipment to monitor their transmissions, the simplest of which is the air monitor: speakers that are playing whatever goes “over the air;” the same thing you hear on your radio. When the station goes down, nothing comes out of those speakers. The second there is a problem with the transmitter, and the signal drops, the phones start ringing. Everyone and their dog (okay, maybe not their dog) wants to report this important bit of information to the people who are making the broadcast and are the first to know when it’s not working. So, while the over-worked and seriously underpaid announcer is trying to get the engineer on the phone, checking settings, flipping switches, and pushing buttons to get things back up, he’s fielding the calls of all those “helpful” people.

So, stop being one of those helpful people. You’re getting in the way of twitter fixing the problem. The next time you see a 503 Server Error, sit back, take a deep breath, and send an e-card to someone, write an email, or call your mom. In fact, do that right now so we can tweet our fantasy football picks before the server goes down again.

Send in the Fail Bird! Tell these tweeps you saw them on Twitter Fail