Saturday, August 08, 2009

Twitter fail

I heard, of course, about Twitter's temporary blackout yesterday. But I have continued to have problems long after everything was allegedly back to normal. I can post from home, using my computer and web browser, just as always. But both yesterday and today I have been unable to connect from my cell phone.

I have previously been able to send updates two ways, using either the text-message function or by logging in to my account on the phone's web browser. Now I can do neither.

First, my mobile scaled-down web browser won't log me in to Twitter, though it continues to do other web stuff as normal. The error message I get vary; sometimes it's a "host not recognized" thing, other times an unhelpful "error in communication" report. Sometimes it doesn't connect to Twitter at all; other times it connects to the page on which I am prompted to enter my user name and password, but when I do, and click on "sign in," it doesn't work. (Same user name and password do work on the web from home, however, so it isn't that they have ceased to be valid.)

Second, text messages to Twitter do not show up. I have rechecked my profile and device settings in Twitter from home, and it certainly seems to know my cell phone number so as to recognize me, and is set to receive them. The messages get sent from my phone, but somehow are lost in the ether. It's all very strange. Using the web, I have wiped out Twitter's memory of my cell phone and then tried (twice) to register it again, but it seems that Twitter just won't accept or recognize texts from my phone. Of course, texts to other people are going through just fine.

This is strange because I would think that these two problems would be completely independent of each other. Whether I can log in using a mobile web browser shouldn't have any effect on whether my account is or is not properly set to receive and broadcast tweets using my phone's SMS functions. So why would the two problems appear simultaneously?

It's not like you've been missing out on a lot of gems, but it's disconcerting nonetheless. (I think my best one came from a Binion's session today. It was, roughly, "Guy at the table never shows his hand when called on the river. I think he should be shot, but it seems that Binion's rules have no such provision.")

I will continue to investigate and try to repair, but not having any idea where the problem might lie, this is not a straightforward task.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://status.twitter.com/post/157979213/restoring-api-and-sms

"Due to defensive measures we’ve taken against the ongoing denial-of-service attack, some Twitter clients are unable to communicate with our API, and many users are unable to tweet via SMS.

We are working as quickly as possible to restore our full service."

genomeboy said...

lol, 3 months ago, who cared about Twitter?..now ZOMG, NO TWITTER!

And of course, Thursday I was trying like heck to tweet about my flopped quad 7's and how I won a AIPF AA v AK to have a nice winner at the Borgata...!

gowhitesox99 said...

hey grump ill be there tomorrow and will be playing at some of your hot spots....maybe ill see ya!