Twitter has faced issues with reliability in the past. When the service first went live, it would have several days of completely flawless operation, followed with a week of fail whale sightings.
During the Presidential debates, and for the day or so afterward, Twitter was spotty. It crashed and hung up and didn’t post updates at all.
I figured that election day would be just as bad, and it nearly was. While there was no fail whale in sight, updates I sent from my phone took hours to be received. Some of them never showed up, even now, 3 days later, those updates have been lost in the ether.

Twitter has released figures from the election day hammering. It was a very good day for them, in all reality.

• Updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday
• 7p-9p PST updates up 200% compared to same time last week
• Signups on Tuesday were up 40.3%
• Between 7p-9p PST signups were up 96.5% compared to same time last week
• Messages per second peaked almost 3x compared to first debate

So, while I might have had some issues, and actually, I gave up trying completely around noon, saving the updating for in front of the PC, Twitter had a very good day, and it looks like their failures might be slowing to a stop. It’s still where I turn to microblog, and it helps me keep in contact with others during the day.

Article Tags: Election | MicroBlogging | social media | Twitter

Filed under: Digital Media, Election, MicroBlogging, Technology, Texting, Twitter