Twitter Suffers Disruptions, Adds Places

Although apparently operating normally this morning, Twitter.com's June performance has been marred by an ongoing series of disruptions and outages over the past two weeks – including availability issues yesterday.

Today the site is fully recovered, according to the Twitter status blog.

On Monday, however, Twitter combated site availability issues "resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching," Twitter said. Users also reported incorrect tweet counts and bursts of elevated errors.

On June 13, Twitter reported large bursts of errors every 20 minutes, as well as site-wide availability issues due to scheduled maintenance. Two days earlier, there were periodic high rates of errors on Twitter.com. And on June 10, Twitter.com suffered an elevated rate of errors and the sporadic back-up and recovery of its timeline.

In May 2010, users posted 1.99 billion tweets, according to Pingdom. Account-holders posted 64 million tweets per day or 2.7 million tweets per hour and 44,481 tweets per minute. Twitter's average June uptime is now 98.56%, according to Pingdom; on June 10, 2010, Twitter's average June uptime rate was 99.16%, Pingdom found.

But not all the news surrounding Twitter was reactive. The company also unveiled Twitter Places on Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. This week, availability will roll-out to 65 countries based on Twitter's partnerships with TomTom and Localeze.

"Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location," said Twitter's Othman Laraki in a company blog.

Places is integrated with Foursquare and Gowalla, and Twitter also is releasing API functionality so developers can integrate Places into their applications, said Laraki. Users may add location information to tweets from browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, he said.

In the future, Twitter plans to bring Places to the iPhone, Android and Blackberry, added Laraki. No timeline was provided.