Is Twitter Down For Everyone or Is it Just Me???

by Jesse Stay — published on July 6th, 2008

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Just today, the New York Times did a post on Alex Payne, a “24-year old internet engineer” who created a site called, “DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com“. This site allows anyone to type in a URL and the site will tell you if it’s just you or down for the entire web. In all it’s a pretty useful site I would think.

The article goes on to show all kinds of examples of companies that have had this issue internally and how useful this site could be. What the article did not cover however is that Payne, the “24-year old internet engineer” is also one of the lead Engineers at Twitter, a site that is very familiar with this issue.

Twitter, known for its very frequent outages and user frustration, may be his biggest user. Leave it to Twitter to solve the world’s problems regarding determining if a site is truly up or not! The one thing we can now say is that at least one employee at Twitter will become successful as a result of Twitter’s outages. Thanks to Techmeme and the New York Times for making my day on this one!

UPDATE: it looks like the New York Times article has updated to state that Payne works for Twitter. It was much more funny when that wasn’t made known :-)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 3:24 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. .

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  • July 6, 2008 at 4:33 am Jesse Stay
    I'm still laughing about this
  • July 6, 2008 at 8:26 am A Bat
    Perhaps a better question considering the circumstances (and forgetting about the website) would be "Is Twitter Up For Anyone?" :D
  • July 6, 2008 at 8:31 am Louis Gray
    I found it amusing as well. It makes sense someone from Twitter would build it, but ooohhh... irony. I hope he didn't make http://www.istwitterdown.com too!
  • July 6, 2008 at 8:33 am Bwana
    After I read the article, I was thinking the same thing Louis
  • July 6, 2008 at 10:38 am Ontario Emperor
    Alex's name always turns up in some interesting places.
  • July 6, 2008 at 10:51 am Sprague D
    Twitter to Jesse: "It's not you. I just need some time to be alone."
  • July 6, 2008 at 10:59 am Todd McKinney
    Wouldn't it be helpful if this was more granular? What parts of Twitter are up seems to be the question people are asking lately.
  • July 6, 2008 at 12:07 pm Jesse Stay
    I can't help but wonder if the reason Twitter is down so often is because of side projects like this :-)
  • July 6, 2008 at 12:11 pm Jesse Stay
    Hmmm...interesting - looks like the NYT article changed the text to mention he works for Twitter now. It wasn't there last night.

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