Having a look at the official Twitter blog, Twitter has announced that they have detected errant API usage through their Jabber resources.
We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.
We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
For god sakes, I hope this is what has been causing all of their issues lately and they get this problem fixed as soon as possible. I need my Twitter fix!
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
I’m so glad I didn’t have “Twitter Week” on Performancing this week. Hehe. It has been such a disappointment lately as far as reliability is concerned.
I already am throwing around a new post idea: “Ten Other Things You Can Do When Something Is Technically Wrong With Twitter.”
1. Be productive
2. Eat food
3. Talk to your family
4. Take a deep breath
5. Work
6. Play GTA 4
7. Watch Leo Laporte on Stickam
8. Pay for expensive gas
9. Listen to WordPress Weekly
10. Have sex
Or something along those lines…
It’s nice that they have been blogging about this a bit more recently. I think the goodwill has been starting to seep away. Nothing for them to be overly worried about right now, but there has probably been enough of an upset for them to realise that there are more alternatives now then there were in 2006 and people only need an excuse to try them.
Foomandoonians last blog post..Twitter applications with actual applications
>_< yeah the twitter downtimes are driving me banana!!
@James some more ideas for your list : http://whentwitterisdown.com/
:)
@James Mowery – That is a great list so far, and I think it would work regardless if twitter is down for a week or not.
@Foomandoonian – I agree. I haven’t been keeping tabs on the official twitter blog but I did so on the day the post was made. Looks like they are really experiencing DB issues as well because of the API crap. Doesn’t sound good for twitter right now
@SierraK – you’re not a monkey are you? because then it would be a good thing that twitter is down :)
@Foomandoonian – Unfortunately Foo, the site is right in that it will entertain me for hours just by the mere fact that I want to refresh and see every message.