TinyURL outage trips up Twitterers

With TinyURL, it's reassuring to see a major Internet service that still looks like it's being run from a dorm room.

"TinyURL is experiencing temporary dificulties." Yes, that's "dificulties."

A service outage at TinyURL, the website that converts long Web addresses to short ones, reminded me today that supersize companies such as Google and Yahoo haven't completely locked up the Internet.

TinyURL was set up in 2002 by Kevin Gilbertson, a young programmer in Minnesota frustrated by the long URLs of newsgroup postings.

Today, Gilbertson claims 1.75 billion hits per month to the service. Yet the TinyURL site still consists mostly of a modest blue-and-white homepage, with a Google ad banner on one side.

TinyURL is used automatically by Twitter to truncate URLs entered into Twitter status updates. Gilbertson couldn't be reached immediately for comment, but Twitter has obviously raised the bar on TinyURL to serve more hits with less downtime. [UPDATE: Kevin Gilbertson said in an email, "Twitter is estimated to be the source of about 8% of our traffic."]

Today's [Friday] outage pointed out, ironically, just how good Gilbertson's uptime is. A few minutes ago, www.tinyurl.com returned a "500 Server Error" page to me. Unlike Twitter's cute-but-uninformative Fail Whale, TinyURL's simple, text-only error page included instructions to edit the URL in my browser to reach a backup server, b.tinyurl.com. That worked.

At 1.75 billion hits per month, it's surprising that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft haven't stepped in with their own shorter-URL services. But it's reassuring to see a major Internet service that still looks like it's being run from a dorm room.

Please, Kevin or whoever, leave "dificulties" misspelled. It's part of your brand.

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags tinyurl

Keep up with the latest tech news, reviews and previews by subscribing to the Good Gear Guide newsletter.

Paul Boutin

The Industry Standard
Show Comments

Most Popular Reviews

Latest Articles

Resources

PCW Evaluation Team

Cate Bacon

Aruba Instant On AP11D

The strength of the Aruba Instant On AP11D is that the design and feature set support the modern, flexible, and mobile way of working.

Dr Prabigya Shiwakoti

Aruba Instant On AP11D

Aruba backs the AP11D up with a two-year warranty and 24/7 phone support.

Tom Pope

Dynabook Portégé X30L-G

Ultimately this laptop has achieved everything I would hope for in a laptop for work, while fitting that into a form factor and weight that is remarkable.

Tom Sellers

MSI P65

This smart laptop was enjoyable to use and great to work on – creating content was super simple.

Lolita Wang

MSI GT76

It really doesn’t get more “gaming laptop” than this.

Featured Content

Product Launch Showcase

Don’t have an account? Sign up here

Don't have an account? Sign up now

Forgot password?