There comes a time in every site's life when it'd be easier to lay down than to keep fighting the uptime fight. And tonight, for whatever reason, both
SmugMug and
Twitter have opted out of the process. While life continues to function, and geeks still have the option to head to
Flickr,
FriendFeed or
Facebook (or any other social network starting with F) to get attention, two of Web 2.0's more engaging companies took a much needed rest around midnight Tuesday morning, and as downtime is a much discussed issue, it appears both sites have gone the extra mile to deliver high-quality graphics to keep us amused as they tackle database issues or anything else that might be getting in the way of their standard operation.
SmugMug Takes A BreatherThat means instead of floating birdies and a failed whale, we get pictures of an ice cream cone and caterpillar from Twitter, and the SmugMug logo watering old servers in vain.
Twitter Cools Off, Whale-FreeThe
Twitter Status blog doesn't indicate the reason for the database efforts, though it may be related to SMS delivery problems mentioned earlier in the day. Meanwhile,
SmugMug's service blog doesn't mention any reason for the unexpected downtime, but image display on FriendFeed was completely broken.
As both services use
Amazon S3, this could be signs of a wider outage, but that's just speculation at this point.
Meanwhile,
Google is still up.
