October 9th, 2009
BreakingPoint's letter to Twitter: 'Let us help you'
Amid all of the whining about Twitter downtime, one company is finally putting its money where its mouth is. BreakingPoint Systems, a network testing company, today published an open letter to Twitter in which it offers the social network free user of its server load testing and other products to help reduce the downtime and improve network performance. Blog author Kyle Flaherty, the company’s communications director, writes:
Yesterday, when Twitter was down due to a “bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services“, I thought about how important Twitter had become to our business and me. I watched the predictable posts complaining about the fail whale and it hit me; rather than throwing criticism, I would be best served getting my hands dirty and helping with the problem. An idea surfaced, which I talked through with our CTO and co-founder Dennis Cox (@denniscox), and the green flag was waved.
BreakingPoint is a leader in network testing tools with customers spanning from giants to even companies of Twitter’s size. The cry to help Twitter was fueled after yesterday’s Twitter downtime / stream freezing issues after the social network reported a “bug.” Rather than join the myriad of people complaining about the service disruption, Flaherty and BreakingPoint decided to offer up some help. The Twitter loyalty is fueled by the company’s rampant adoption of Twitter used by both employees and members of its community of load testing professionals and network and security engineers. Recognizing the value of Twitter early on, the company even developed afeature to test the ability of network devices and application servers to handle Twitter traffic.
With Twitter’s continued of downtime it’s clear that they are having some scalability issues and BreakingPoint is a trusted company for dealing with such issues. Will Twitter take the company up on the offer? This user hopes so.
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
For daily updates on Jennifer's activities, follow her on Twitter.
Subscribe to Social Business via Email alerts or RSS.
