Reports are flooding both FriendFeed and my inbox of micro-messaging service Twitter currently being down. That in and of itself is not new, but the fact that it appears Twitter has accidentally redirected its millions of users to its internal staging server is problematic.
When you go to Twitter.com now you are prompted with a message “To view this page, you need to log in to area ‘Production-Staging Access - Employees Only’ on twitter.com:80.” It then prompts you for a name and password. Probably not something you want to have out in the open.
Failure to enter a password takes you to a 401 Authorization Required page.
I’ve emailed Twitter on the issue and I’m sure they’re working to fix it. As longtime users of the service will know, Twitter used to be plagued by appearance of the “Fail Whale”, a whale cartoon that Twitter put up every time it went down. This new “Fail Whale” is much less interesting.
Every service has downtime, but Twitter has a pretty rich history of it. And now that it’s gaining mainstream popularity, the service will have to work harder to make sure errors like this don’t pop up. After all, how is Rick Sanchez going to do his CNN show without it?
And how is the Utah government going to function without Twitter?
You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.
Update: And she’s back. Another Fail Whale successfully harpooned.
