When the news broke on June 24 that microblogging sensation Twitter picked up new venture investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the company -- as luck would have it -- was suffering a service outage. "Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled," read the message.
Trouble is, that message and others like it have become all too common on Twitter. The site, a tool that lets some one million people exchange brief 140-character messages, seems to be as unreliable as it is popular. In fact, it's the surging traffic, in part, that leads to failures.
Noises About Forsaking Twitter
The new investments, from Bezos and Boston's Spark Capital, will give the company "some runway and breathing room" as it invests in a big technology upgrade, says Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder. He would not disclose the dollar or equity amounts of the investments. The goal, he says, is to rebuild the architecture "piece by piece." The process is already underway and "will take months," Stone adds. Existing Twitter backers Union Square Ventures in New York and Tokyo-based Digital Garage also participated in the most recent round.
Bijan Sabet, a partner at Spark who landed a Twitter board seat through the investment, says the "highest priority is providing rock-solid service." He envisions Twitter becoming "a global communication utility system," though he didn't elaborate on what that will look like. Bezos didn't respond to a phone call seeking comment.
More crucial to Twitter's future than deep-pocketed investors and dependable machines are its throngs of users around the world. And it's not clear these devotees will stick around through months of hiccups. Some are tempted to bail for rivals and related offerings, such as Plurk and FriendFeed, which appear to suffer fewer outages. As blogger Rafe Needleman asked on FriendFeed on...

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