--- description: These days, its outages -- rare though they are -- really matter. title: When Twitter Is Down, the News Doesn’t Go Through image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Tech](/tag/time-section-tech/) ## Tech Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # When Twitter Is Down, the News Doesn't Go Through by [Harry McCracken](/author/harry-mccracken/) ## Harry McCracken Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 12, 2014 9:39 PM CUT by [Harry McCracken](/author/harry-mccracken/) ## Harry McCracken Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 12, 2014 9:39 PM CUT Twitter [went down yesterday for around 45 minutes](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/03/11/twitter-goes-down-chaos-and-productivity-ensue/ "undefined"). Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have been news: In the heyday of the Failwhale, Twitter went down a _lot_. But now it’s a rare enough occurrence that when I heard about the outage, my first paradoxical impulse was…to tweet about it. I’m sure I was far from the only person whose brain malfunctioned that way. Over at _Wired_, Mat Honan has a good piece on how [Twitter’s essential role in spreading news makes downtime into a major problem](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2014/03/twitter-big-fail-whale-now/ "undefined") in a way that it wasn’t back when the service was theoretically designed to let you tell your friends what you were up to at the moment. Thought-provoking sound bite: --- > “” --- I’m usually O.K. with the fact that services such as Twitter and Facebook are proprietary, rather than open, distributed standards such as e-mail which can’t come crashing down for everybody all at once. But Twitter has indeed become a sort of chatty, social Emergency Broadcasting System. Maybe we do need something similar which can’t be felled by one software glitch — which was the culprit that took the service offline yesterday. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/22357/when-twitter-is-down-the-news-doesnt-go-through/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/22357/when-twitter-is-down-the-news-doesnt-go-through/"},"headline":"When Twitter Is Down, the News Doesn't Go Through","datePublished":"2014-03-12T21:39:42.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:01:42.975Z","description":"These days, its outages -- rare though they are -- really matter.","url":"https://time.com/22357/when-twitter-is-down-the-news-doesnt-go-through/","keywords":["Tech","Technologizer","twitter"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Harry McCracken","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/harry-mccracken/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/22357/when-twitter-is-down-the-news-doesnt-go-through/","name":"When Twitter Is Down, the News Doesn't Go Through"}}]}] ```