Did anyone but hipsters care that Twitter was down before today?

If you are part of the ‘Twittersphere’, you have likely heard of the ‘Fail Whale’, the cartoony whale held up by wires when Twitter found its service interrupted.  During the not-so-rare occurrences of the fail whale over the last three years of service, there would be whining and complaining, but never would much hinge on it – before this week.

fail whale

Twitter has been due an overhaul for some time.  It’s infrastructure has been under attack from it’s own popularity ever since it catapulted into the stratospheric 40 million user realm this spring.

In an interesting if underread article in Digidaily on Friday, Aldon Hynes predicted an impending Twittercaust.  Twitter has known for some time that it’s been reaching its limits.  The site frequently exceeds rate limits and has been noticeably strained.

This week’s Iranian election has brought this into high relief.  Twitter was originally supposed to shut down for planned maintenance on Monday 6/15, but owing to an important rally in Iran, they were begged off.  Reason?  Twitter is about the only means to report what is happening on the ground in Iran now.  All other webservices have been largely shut down.  Twitter acquiesced and moved their maintenance window to right now (2 pm PT).

The State Department has even gotten into the game.  Can you imagine the State Dept calling Mark Zuckerberg to ask him to keep Facebook up?  They block cell phones in the State Dept.   As reported by CNN, The State Dept asked Twitter to keep it’s Iranian feeds coming.

Today at the 140 conference, Fred Wilson covered the importance of Twitter.  Basically 20-30% of the traffic that his portfolio sites are receiving comes from Twitter.  No Surprise.  Techcrunch confirmed much the same thing.

Hell, 100% of the site traffic for my site comes from Twitter and it sucks that Twitter is down while I’m writing this…I am betting that there are a lot of sites that are seeing less traffic right now.  Oh, wait I will get traffic from Techcrunch too.  Thanks Arrington.

But meanwhile in Iran it’s about 5am and all we can hope is that Twitter can help them get the justice they deserve.