Re: Using twitter as an outage notification (was =?UTF-8?Q?:=20Fire, =20Power=20loss=20at=20Fisher=20Plaza=20in=20Seattle)?=

Tue Jul 7 19:50:01 UTC 2009

On Jul 6, 2009, at 11:08 AM, nevin at enginehosting.com wrote:

> On Monday, July 6, 2009 10:00am, "Michael Holstein" <michael.holstein at csuohio.edu 
> > said:
>>
>>> However it doesn't scale
>>
>> Anyone who's seen the "fail whale" might argue the same about  
>> Twitter.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Michael Holstein
>> Cleveland State University
>
> With a past week of highly visible outages in the data center/ 
> provider industry, take a look at the section: "Crisis  
> Communications Moves Fast" in this story, for another view of using  
> communications channels like Twitter.  http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-day-after-a-brutal-week-for-uptime/
>
> -- Nevin Lyne
> -- CTO
> -- EngineHosting.com
>
>

Just to add something to this, twitter has been slow all afternoon and  
now I am getting the "fail whale"

Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again

I presume that this has something to do with the Michael Jackson  
Memorial Service now underway.

I just thought I would point out in real time the obvious danger of  
using a backup service that itself could fail under load,
especially if your outage and the load could be correlated, say in a  
disaster or public emergency situation.

Regards
Marshall

>
>

Regards
Marshall Eubanks
CEO / AmericaFree.TV