WebProNews

Six days without Twitter isn't a terribly long time; a person can, after all, survive without food for six days.  What's a micro-blogging service in comparison to bread and meat?  Still, the revelation that Twitter experienced about six days of downtime in 2007 has proven fairly embarrassing.

Eight days ago, a Pingdom article mocked a hosting company's guarantee of 95 percent uptime.  The article also stated, "Even a 99% uptime guarantee is really far from stellar.  That would allow for 7 hours and 26 minutes of downtime per month, and more than 3 days and 15 hours per year."

Erick Schonfeld points out that Twitter, by comparison, is averaging 98.06 percent uptime for the year, which comes out to five days and 23 hours of unavailability (so far).  Also, thanks to the nature of the service, its users get the perfect opportunity to vent their frustrations every time an outage is resolved.

Think we (and/or Schonfeld and Pingdom) are exaggerating the matter?  Even Google's poorest-performing property, the Swedish Google Search (www.google.se), was down for only 48 minutes per year the last time anybody checked.  Google's most reliable main site, the Brazilian Google Search (www.google.com.br), was down for three.

Twitter's growth and popularity seem largely unaffected by these issues, though, so there's little reason to believe they'll be addressed in the near future.