Twitter abruptly dumps Web host Joyent

Some users of Twitter, the addictive microblogging service, noticed that it abruptly stopped working for them over the past 24 hours. The reason? An abrupt switch away from Joyent, the company which hosted — past tense — Twitter's servers. Companies change Web hosts all the time, and the moves are always wrenching. But Joyent and Twitter had just happily announced that they were working together to keep Twitter up through this Sunday's Super Bowl.

Yesterday, Twitter said of Joyent:

Throughout our amazing growth, Twitter has relied on Joyent's highly scalable infrastructure.

Today, Twitter said:

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we've been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot.

The obvious conclusion is that, even as Twitter was praising Joyent, it was preparing to move off its servers. And the larger lesson? That whenever a customer praises a vendor, they're lying through their teeth.

Dave Young, Joyent's CEO, tells me that his company doesn't keep customers on contracts, so he disagrees with some people who characterize the Twitter split as a divorce. And he said that yesterday's blog post were his company's response to those who would blame Joyent for Twitter's outages, even when it wasn't responsible. Twitter's new Web host? NTT, the Asian telecommunications giant, which should help Twitter's ambitions to expand into Japan. One downside: NTT is unlikely to serve as a punching bag for unhappy Twitter users the way Joyent has.

3:00 PM on Thu Jan 31 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,168 views
6 comments

Comments

davidu at 05:52 PM on 01/31/08
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NTT is unlikely to be their webhost. NTT mostly provides backbone and transit services. It's probably NTT subsidiary Verio -- which has a large datacenter in Fremont -- that is doing the hosting and colo for them.

If that's the case, they are in for a rude awakening as Verio Enterprise Hosting is a disaster in terms of the operation of their network.

If you're totally off the mark, and they are at some carrier-neutral facility and are just using NTT transit, then they are making a solid move. NTT operates a fantastic global network (which we use in at least five locations here at OpenDNS).
BobDope at 07:40 PM on 01/31/08
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It's okay. If I can't get my tweet out about the great burrito I just ate RIGHT NOW, I can live with that.
abmw at 11:50 PM on 01/31/08
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Even if Verio is owned by NTT,why would Twitter allow for such disruption by moving the service before nailing down issues of reliability?

Just because a new owner or investor owns hosting infrastructure is no reason to push a preemptive move of such herculean proportions.

Then again, the text messaging…..profits…ease of gateway interconnect….speculation.
zeef at 04:48 AM on 02/01/08
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A couuple things stand out here.

#1, you don't have an abrupt interruption of service unless a) someone fucked up, or b) something's horribly mismanaged. no unqualified or un-credible speculation should be made on which side of the fence that happened on, but you can be sure it happened.

#2, any competent technical team is going to go with what works best. if they figured out a better way to architect twitter's innards with someone else's infrastructure and/or by putting their own hardware in it, a quick move to it would be entirely expected.

joyent, for its part, does a good job at doing what it does.

but what it does isn't always going to be the best solution, for everyone, at every point in time.
macimmn at 12:12 PM on 02/08/08
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NTT America is hosting Twitter now according to the Twitter blog

Twitter Chooses NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services: [blog.twitter.com]
flakattract at 03:58 PM on 02/18/08
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Not sure where DAVIDU got this information about NTT/Verio but it appears to be way off base.

Verio is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT America. It provides shared web hosting for personal or small business use. NTT America is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications and provides Internet network and hosting services including collocation and leased servers under the NTT America banner.

There never has been a NTT/Verio data center in Freemont. NTT/Verio operates a 100,000+ square foot facility in Milpitas/San Jose with another large data center in Sterling Virginia. There are several legacy data centers in California however none were ever in Freemont.

Verio, as a subsidiary of NTT uses the NTT network, not sure how one would be so bad and the other so great since they are the exact same networks.

The NTT facility in Milpitas/San Jose has, last I heard, separate backbone connections from four other carriers aside from the NTT backbone.