Olympics May Be The Reason (Ha!) For Today’s Twitter Outage

Twitter’s having problems today! Oh, what’s that, you knew already? Well fine then. But we’ve just gotten our hands on some additional data related to today’s outage courtesy of application monitoring platform Compuware APM. The company pulled measurements from its backbone data centers, Last Mile network (actual end users) and mobile devices, and has basically documented the problem by examining response times across these sources.

We’re told that the current speculation is that the Twitter outage may have to do with the increased activity due to Olympics-related traffic.

The Olympics are expected to bring an unprecedented surge of activity by sports fans on social networking sites, the company tells us, and some sluggishness had already been reported. Compuware says it’s now diving into the data further to determine whether or not the outage had anything to do with the increased Olympics traffic, or if that was merely a coincidence.

For those who missed it (i.e., people with a life), Twitter experienced an extended outage today beginning around 11:23 AM ET, according to reports from performance monitoring company Apica. The service briefly recovered at 12:04 PM, then crashed again at 12:15 PM. At 12:58 PM, Twitter started delivering server-side error codes. One of those was the pretty hilarious one you see above. For whatever reason (groan), the message handing function there didn’t fill in what the reason was, leaving users scratching their heads.

Below, the charts. Click to see larger: