July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s app store appears to be having some technical challenges today. Perhaps it’s the massive influx of people downloading Google’s new Gmail app.

I haven’t been able to update apps all day, and apparently, I’m not alone. Others can’t download apps either:

iTunes and App Store down for many, can't get or update apps dld.bz/bSvap #iPhone

—
John Morgan (@IPhonesAppMgr) November 30, 2012

Is @AppStore down?? Can’t download apps, “app no longer available” #frustrated #apple

—
 Rafael C. (@Rafo1580) December 04, 2012

It’s possible that the new Gmail app has something to do with the issue, as it seems to be particularly challenging to download and/or update. Devindra Hardawar, our national editor, was able to download the Gmail app, but only after deleting the existing app and re-installing. Others have been entirely out of luck:

Whoa. The new Gmail app for iOS bringing down the app store ?

—
Amit Bhor (@daamitt) December 04, 2012

When I tried to download the Gmail app for an earlier story, the app store app on my phone could not find it, although it was most certainly visible on the web. Now I can see it but cannot download it — as you can see in the title graphic for this post.

I’ve contacted Apple and asked for an explanation or statement, and will update this post if I hear anything.

The service is certainly not down for all — our own Tom Cheredar was also able to access the app store and download apps. If you can’t, there is only one option, however unpalatable as it is for us impatient denizens of the digital world … being patient:

Looks like the App Store is getting hammered; if you get a message about the new Gmail app not being available, try again later.

—
Lifehacker (@lifehacker) December 04, 2012

Update: Twitter returned to fully-operational status at about 9:30am Pacific time, after about 45 minutes offline.

Twitter is down right now — hard down. The site is unresponsive, and DownForEveryoneOrJustMe says it’s down for you as well as Yours Truly. In addition, any web address shorteners based on Twitter are down as well, so any t.co links you click on will not work.

Twitter’s site status page confirms the issue, saying simply: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

Visiting the site a few minutes ago I received nothing, but now I’m seeing this:

Source: John Koetsier

Now that is down, and down hard. A little embarrassing?

I reached out to a press contact at Twitter, and she responded with the following confirmation:

Thanks for getting in touch. We’re aware of the issue and are looking into it. Will let you know when we have an update. And keep an eye on status.twitter.com for updates as well.

A few weeks ago, a number of us in the VentureBeat office were wondering what a Twitter outage costs the economy. After all, Twitter is a big part of our economic life: With over half a billion members, Twitter is huge and still growing.

News outlets, retailers, and companies of all kinds depend on the service to promote their businesses.

So we asked an analyst, Ray Wang at Constellation Research. According to Wang, the economy could be losing as much as $25 million per minute of Twitter outage.

Here are his assumptions:

1. Twitter has 500 million users
2. Let’s say 100 million are business users
3. Let’s use an average salary of 125k (blended rate) over 124,800 minutes
   (assuming a 40 hour work week/year)
4. Let’s say an outage means we lose about $1/person/minute
5. Let’s say 25% of that 100M are online during the work hour doing real work during an outage.

So according to the Twitter status update on the site issued … 40 minutes ago … this current outage may have cost the economy $1 billion already.

A couple of caveats:

This is a scribble-on-the-back-of-the-envelope calculation. And work that is not done this very minute on Twitter, or sales that don’t happen right now because you didn’t get that tweet about the big sale, may very well happen tomorrow. Or as soon as Twitter pops back up.

In addition, although I think the “blended rate” amount takes into consideration wages and benefits, most people are NOT making $125,000 per year. So that might need to be sliced in half, or more.

But massive communication utility outages certainly result in real economic loss — even if it’s not $25 million a minute.