TypePad Tweets Its Downtime

Twitter is becoming an important communications tool for hosting companies experiencing outages, especially as it's become more stable. An example: Last night Six Apart used Twitter to update users on an outage for its TypePad blog hosting service. "A bad power supply in one of our core routers has some TypePad blogs not displaying," the company reported last night. "Updates shortly and of course on status.typepad.com." Pingdom reports that the outage lasted for about an hour. 

An hour may not seem like much. But news spreads quickly for companies that host a lot of blogs, and Twitter is increasingly where outage reports are turning up first. Sometimes these tweets are from frustrated users, and sometimes from a company complaining about its data center provider. 

Six Apart is just one of many companies in the hosting and data center sector who are monitoring Twitter and using it to communicate with users during outages (see Ogilvy for more about Six Apart's approach to "Twustomer Service"). Are you using Twitter to track what people are saying about your company, or to provide updates during outages? Leave a comment and tell us about it.