So, one thing that really grinds my gears is when a website offers a service which they know doesn’t work, but will not make any reference to that on their website. For example, according to the Twitter website you can send twitts over SMS or IM. So, you sign in and set up your SMS account with no problem, but then comes the option for IM using Jabber. Why would Twitter still have this option available if they know it doesn’t work?

We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.

We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
Thanks for your patience!

Update: We’re turning off IM services for the evening (Friday) to allow for the system to recover. We hope to turn things back on Saturday.

This was back in May 23rd, 2008… get with the program guys.

~dmacias