Twitter Outages Part of a PR Stunt? Not Likely…
Making the rounds this morning is an implausible idea that the Twitter downtimes are actually planned to keep people 'wanting more'. While drug dealers have used this in the past, to great success, I don't think the geek-mentality would think this trade-off on the pride of creating a stable, useful system would be worth it.
Take a look at Slashdot... the ultimate geek hang-out. If they went down, it's a scream-fest and they loose credibility - not gain it. Twitter is a communication channel, no one thinks the phone company is good for killing service. Nope. This is something they are trying to prevent, and simply can't. I'm not sure why, but it's got to be that there are things going on behind the scenes that the casual user doesn't see.
The excuse for the latest outage is a database outage due to a routine update going bad. Now this I know about... if you're updating a 'production' database during working hours you need to make sure that you have a back-up, or a fail-over, or something so that if, on the one-in-a-million chance that something goes wrong you aren't out of business. They messed up on their disaster/recovery plan. Maybe it's not big enough to have one of them, but I think it's time they think about it.
In the end, it's nice, and people will use it, but they'd use it more if it were more reliable - not less.