Wampum

Apropos of what is going on in Iran, Twitter amazingly announced that it would take Twitter out for 90 minutes at 9am in Tehran.

Maintenance window tonight, 9:45p Pacific

We will have 90 minutes of maintenance starting tonight at 9:45p Pacific. Critical network upgrades will be performed during this time.

Update (2:03p): Unfortunately the timing of this maintenance period is not within our control as our provider needs to perform these network upgrades. We apologize for the outage and hope to be back from the maintenance as quickly as our host can perform the work.

Update (4:24p): Downtime has been rescheduled for 2p Pacfiic tomorrow, June 16th. Please read more on our blog.

The follow-up is this:

Down Time Rescheduled

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today's decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.

Now the amazing bit is this ... why isn't Twitter multi-homed, and what is the nature of the "network upgrade" is that it brings down their entire network. Everything they have is in the NTT cloud, and NTT is a competent network operator, so ... where in the original business plan did it say "when we get here we shut down completely, utterly, globally for at least 90 minutes"?