Twitter and its Culture of Downtime

Despite continued changes in its staff and infrastructure, Twitter continues to experience frequent outages. The wildly popular micro-blogging service has had four significant outages over the past seven days, totaling more than 7 hours of downtime, according to Pingdom. The service already had the most downtime of any major social media site in 2008, after being offline for six full days during 2007.

Are the users fed up yet? Apparently not. In fact, some twitter users singing seem to be drawing inspiration from the regular outages:

I guess if you can't fix your infrastructure, the next best thing is to have such devoted users that they take the downtime in stride, using it as an opportunity to compose songs and cartoons about the service. Which raises a question: is Twitter's downtime stifling productivity, or making its users more creative?

Of course, there are also those who argue that the Internet's productivity and creativity both improve every time Twitter goes down.

UPDATE: GigaOm reports that Twitter is in the midst of raising and other large round of venture capital. Perhaps the company will invest in new cash in fixing its struggling infrastructure.