June 21, 2012, THURS 11:59am – 1:00pm
went down for more than an hour on Thursday afternoon, depriving users of a place to complain that is down.
The outage began at 11:59 a.m. ET, according to ‘s page on tracking site Pingdom. Service returned intermittently around 1 p.m., but less than an hour later, crashed again.
“Engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” a spokeswoman told CNNMoney. She declined to comment on a reason for the outage.
The June 21 outage was the longest disruption in service since an hour-long episode on October 7, which came during a month filled with hundreds of very brief outages, according to Pingdom’s data.
Downtime is a common problem for websites, though has been far better lately than it was a few years ago, when the site became notorious for its extensive outages.
Thursday’s crash was extensive enough that didn’t even display its famous “Fail Whale” error message. Instead, the site simply timed out.
‘s temporary demise sent users to other social networks, including the blogging site Tumblr. As one commenter put it on CNNMoney’s own Tech Tumblr: “I enjoy the fact that when goes down, my Tumblr explodes. :)”
Others confirmed the crash by checking sites like outage tracker downforeveryoneorjustme.com — which, coincidentally, is the brainchild of a engineer.
Alex Payne wrote about his creation in a 2008 blog post, which also chronicled ‘s growing pains at the time: “Of late, I’ve tried as much as possible to focus my time at on building a new system that works at scale and does so predictably and measurably. That’s not easy when the current system is still on fire.”
Compared to those problems, Thursday’s outage appears to be just a tiny little brush fire.
