Outage Hurts Twitter More Than It Hurts You

Twitter blamed its on-again, off-again outages Thursday on a “cascading bug” that left 140-character addicts in a state of painful withdrawl.

But the pain could be most acute for Twitter itself as the company seeks to ramp up its credibility as a go-to venue for advertisers.

Twitter says the service was down for about an hour and forty minutes total during two separate outages. Though exact figures on Twitter’s revenues and traffic aren’t available, a little basic math hints at the scale of the losses. In terms of pure traffic, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said this week that the service had topped 400 million tweets per day. That’s nearly 17 million tweets per hour lost to the world on average, or up to 2.83 billion characters. The number could be much higher since the outages came during the middle of the U.S. workday.