Today Twitter Was Down
By Jimmy Chen
This morning, for about an hour, Twitter was “so down” even the Fail Whale was missing. When a website is still able to present their specially designed “down” page, you know it’s still sort of working. But when you start seeing their code all exposed (i.e. <%=whatever the hell this is %>), the end of the world may be near. Of course, the script-tags are meant to be automatically populated with a specific reason and its respective deadline. None of the “Back Home,” “About,” “Help,” or “Status” links worked, since, well, the entire domain was down. Each link seemed to mock the situation. I imagined the Twitter Fail Whale beached, its viscera cut open and drooping on the sand, the once helpful birds now downsized to flies. Fortunately, the “Twitter Status” field – which links to their Tumblr – still worked. Hungry for something, I clicked.
It’s funny how they refer to us as “users,” like heroin addicts slouched on a sidewalk, our bruised veins blue like a hyperlink. Though at times I feel like Twitter is the user — using us, the gaps in our lives which we attempt to fill 140 characters at a time, all the time, the massive scroll of daily prayer. The followers we wish we had, the DMs we wish we would receive from attractive strangers, the avatars we’d like to be. To the 51 individuals who tweeted this, I want to say to you: No. Twitter is down. Do you understand what is happening? You can tweet it in Tumblr, but it won’t manifest in Twitter. Whatever. That’s like so 37 minutes ago.
In the hour that Twitter was down, 953 people tried to tweet that Twitter was down. Perhaps they thought they were the exception, that Twitter would miraculously work for one glorious nanosecond to squeeze out their tweet. I imagine these people with college educations or higher, perhaps even stumbling through a Logic prerequisite class at some point. I imagine their index fingers as tiny monsters attached to a nervous system so nervous that they simply had to tweet that, without entertaining the inward-loop into which any more thought on the matter would propel them. Everything is back to normal. I refreshed the tab and things seem to be fine now, except for a few tweets by a few people who I’m considering unfollowing. Because, clearly, they are insane.