This morning Twitter stopped working in our house. None of our computers could access Twitter, either through a Twitter client like TweetDeck or directly at Twitter.com. Every other site was working fine. We just couldn’t get to Twitter.
I checked http://www.isthisdownforyou.com/, which reported that Twitter.com was up. I could also get to Twitter through my Blackberry. What the heck was going on?
Things like this are incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. I’d already verified repeatability, which is the first rule of troubleshooting. I finally rebooted the cable modem, leaving it unplugged from power for two minutes. That solved the problem.
Allow me to take this opportunity to let you in on a little secret in the world of IT: Just because we fix a problem doesn’t mean we understand or can explain it.
ETA: I have heard some reports that Twitter was down hard during this time, but that’s not what I saw on my end. There was no update on the Twitter status page, and I could get to Twitter through SocialScope on my Blackberry. That latter point means that the Twitter API was working. It’s not at all uncommon for Twitter.com to be down, but I’ve never seen the API go unresponsive for more than five minutes or so. TweetDeck remained unable to get updates for a full hour. This should imply that the API was down, but again, I could get to Twitter using SocialScope on my Blackberry. So, who the heck knows. It makes even less sense that the API would work for one Twitter client and not another.