Datasheet

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Chapter 1: How Do I Get Started with Twitter?
Viewing Twitter’s Current Status
Twitter puts the fun in funky and the hip in friendship, but it can also sometimes put the ugh in
ugly. I’m talking here about Twitter’s occasional reliability problems. Twitter’s original infrastructure
wasn’t built to handle the massive amount of traffic it now bears, so every so often there will be a
hiccup, a glitch, or even an outright failure.
These failures arise when Twitter’s server simply gets overloaded, so it can’t process any new data
until some processing power is freed up. You know this is the case when you try to do something
on Twitter and you see, instead, the infamous fail whale, as shown in Figure 1.2.
1.2 If Twitter gets overwhelmed by updates, the impossible-not-to-love fail whale shows up to
let you know.
The good news is that the fail whale’s moment on the stage is almost always mercifully brief, so
you should be able to continue what you were doing in a few seconds or, at most, a few minutes.
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