Just today, the New York Times did a post on Alex Payne, a “24-year old internet engineer” who created a site called, “DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com“. This site allows anyone to type in a URL and the site will tell you if it’s just you or down for the entire web. In all it’s a pretty useful site I would think.
The article goes on to show all kinds of examples of companies that have had this issue internally and how useful this site could be. What the article did not cover however is that Payne, the “24-year old internet engineer” is also one of the lead Engineers at Twitter, a site that is very familiar with this issue.
Twitter, known for its very frequent outages and user frustration, may be his biggest user. Leave it to Twitter to solve the world’s problems regarding determining if a site is truly up or not! The one thing we can now say is that at least one employee at Twitter will become successful as a result of Twitter’s outages. Thanks to Techmeme and the New York Times for making my day on this one!
UPDATE: it looks like the New York Times article has updated to state that Payne works for Twitter. It was much more funny when that wasn’t made known 🙂
Stay N' Alive 