I remember when Twitter being down was a regular thing. Then for nearly two years we got used to Twitter being pretty rock solid. I’m not sure what is going on these days over at Twitter HQ but we are once again without their service. 

At least they’ve given us a good reason for being down. “<=%reason %>. In all honesty, at least they have a homepage again. Earlier today you got nothing when going to www.twitter.com. So this is a step in the right direction from what appears on the surface to be a DDoS attack.

Beyond the fact that people aren’t able to update us on the every nuance of their lives, Twitter being down can cause even more severe problems across the web.

I originally noticed that Twitter was having issues over an hour ago when I was unable to use a Twitter universal login on another site. This highlights a major weakness in using Twitter or Facebook as an OAuth system for other sites. I use it here with my share buttons and with Livefyre comments. Luckily Livefyre will also let you log in with half a dozen other accounts including their own.

If I wanted to log into over a dozen apps and sites I use regularly, using Twitter, I would not be able to. Few of these apps are “mission critical” for me but for others they might be. Does OAuth not have a backup plan for outages such as these? I’d feel better if there was some sort of double authentication system perhaps called “OOAuth” which would allow me to use more than one service to authenticate myself universally.