Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Suffers 4 Hour Outage

by Jon Russell, thenextweb.com
July 22nd 2012

Update: After 10 minutes of working regularly, Posterous has gone offline again. The site first went down around 17:30 PST – stay posted for more.

Going offline is the nightmare-scenario for blogging platforms and it is one that Tumblr-rival Posterous suffered this morning (Asia time – evening US time) after the company – bought by Twitter in March – lost “multiple” databases, taking its service offline for four hours.

The issue prevented existing users from accessing dashboards and posting content but it appears that published posts and Posterous blogs were still accessible during the problems.

It is unclear, however, if data from its 15 million registered users has been affected by the database loses.

We noticed access to the user dashboard was restored at 21:30 PST, four hours after the company took to Twitter to reveal that it was having issues.

Posterous initially said things had returned to normal after half an hour, but that response was premature and the site remained inaccessible for a further three and a half hours.

We’re looking into site issues. Sorry for the inconvenience. — posterous (@posterous) July 22, 2012

We lost a database but we’re back up now. Sorry, all! — posterous (@posterous) July 22, 2012

We have lost multiple databases and are working to bring the site back up as quickly as we can. Look for updates here. — posterous (@posterous) July 22, 2012

Site outages often prompt scathing reactions (particularly when a blogging platform is concerned) so it’s interesting to note that the responses were generally voicing disappointment rather than anger – although some cited the outage and Twitter deal as a reason to leave the service.

Oh no. @posterous is down and ate the post I was working on. Sad. — Kathy Phan (@kathyphan) July 22, 2012

noooooooooooo Posterous is down!!

— Mithi (@babblingbrat) July 22, 2012

Come back @posterous I miss you.

— Rachael is a Geek (@geekyrachael) July 22, 2012

Well, it might just be time for me to give up on @Posterous as my blog host. I should have moved when they announced the Twitter acquisition

— Nathan Hall (@nathanghall) July 22, 2012

Posterous was briefly inaccessible this week during a planned maintenance and that could yet be connected with today’s problems.

Outages are a unfortunate possibility for all Web-based services but, for a blogging platform, a weekend outage of four hours is most definitely bad news that is bound to affect users and their perception of its reliability.

Posterous was ‘aquihired’ by Twitter for an undisclosed sum in March, just three weeks after saying it had “absolutely no plans to sell”.

The deal has plenty of synergy but, as we saw with Google’s purchase of Sparrow this week, big company-led startup acquisitions often prompt users to jump ship, out of concerns for the security of their data and the potential that the service will be shut down.

Twitter revealed it had no initial plans to close or change the service post acquisition, and that may have helped Posterous maintain a good level of users. However, the blog platform’s longterm future is not entirely clear as numerous engineers joined Twitter.

We’ve reached out to Posterous for further details.

This article was initially posted when the site was down, and has since been rewritten after the service came back online.

Image via Flickr / MikeCogh

Original Page: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/22/twitter-owned-posterous-loses-multiple-databases-service-down-for-2-hours/

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