The noise on Twitter at the moment is not the new iPhone apps or the Dark Knight film, it’s where have my followers gone?. Around 15 hours ago Twitter posted on the status blog they were having problems and decided to put the site into maintenance mode to fix. 3 hours after we got the following message (no pun intended).
From the Get-Satisfaction website complaints have been flooding in
A comment was made on one of the Get-Satisfaction posts by Jason Goldman a Twitter employee
Thank you to all the folks who provided additional information. We went into maintenance mode to recover from the missing user problem which was caused by a data inconsistency problem.
We were able to restore to an earlier version of the relationship data. You may still see out of date information for one of the following reasons:
1) The changes are still propagating out to all parts of the site. It will take several hours for the data to be correctly reflected everywhere.
2) There may be some missing data as a result of this restore. In particular, changes you made to your social relationships in the past 12 hours may not be reflected.
3) Notwithstanding the first two points, the counts that appear in your profile for followers or followings may be slightly different than they were before. Those counts are generated from a cache that was not always a perfect reflection of the true data. Therefore, the counts may slightly change.
I completely understand how frustrated everyone is by this outage. Thanks for your patience as we recover and work to make sure it won’t happen again.
Getting the message out to the regular twitter user has not been good on this occasion, on TweetDeck I’m getting between 20-30 tweets per update still asking the same thing “Where are my Friends??” which means communication to and from the user is not good.
To increase communications between twitter and it’s ever growing user base would it be a better idea for every new user that signs up for an account to get followed by Twitter automatically. Or send an email though with the current problem, this would give users some indication as to what the hell’s going on, without looking through status blogs etc..?
Watching all the tweets it’s clear to see it’s not downtime that will make users switch (and I hope they don’t) to another service but bad communication.
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