Yesterday’s 40 minute Twitter fail was caused by breakdowns at three data centres, which left many users unable to Tweet, the microblogging service has admitted. Twitter apologised to users for the outage, which was caused by failure of its resiliency measures, and came on the same day that numerous cloud-based services went down, including Microsoft Azure and Google Talk. The company said the downtime was not caused by an upsurge in traffic because of the Olympics, as some had suspected. Once one of its data centres went down, another one was supposed to take over. But that parallel system failed, as did another one, making for a triple whammy.
Amazon and Twitter both saw this week how much the world relies on their services. First, Amazon suffered a patch of downtime following a power failure in a North Virginia data center -- leading to a number of high-profile sites falling with it -- and many jumped to Twitter to complain. Ironically, it was Twitter's turn to stumble a few days later. But the microblogging site's recent downtime generated a lot more buzz than one might have expected. Twitter goes down all the time, right? Wrong.
It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collectedpersonal data about its users. A lot of data.
Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.
Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it.
Twitter said it will allow users to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information used for advertising.
Last year, Facebook announced plans to build its second data center in the north of Sweden. The cold air means that Facebook won't have to spend as much money on cooling, which reduces overall energy costs -- by far the biggest expense in running a data center. (Video)
