I had hoped to be writing you next to announce our latest features and improvements but, unfortunately, I’m writing about a critical bug that is made worse by a freak storm
We have discovered, through user reports, a bug in the manual ‘add tweet’ function. Although we are not sure of the exact cause, we know which recent update is likely to cause this fog to be introduced into the system. This means the fix is relatively simple, we just need to roll back some recent updates.
It is highly unfortunate that the discovery of this but also coincided with a freak, four minutes storm in Bangladesh where our development office is. A brief burst of very strong wind has knocked down trees and power lines.
The team there has been without an Internet connection for three days and have been unable to address the bug.
As a result, I’m going to have to ask you not to use the manual ‘add tweet’ function. Playlists and RSS feeds are working fine.
So, what are we doing about it?
For now, we wait for our Internet access to be restored.
But also we have already started the process of opening a US development office in Colorado where we will have additional programming staff and close to 24-hour coverage for our technical support team. This will also give us redundant staff in case, like now, extraordinary circumstances affect one of our offices.
We are still a very young organization, but we are identifying needs and adding resources steadily. In the long-term, bugs and freak storms won’t stop us from making the 140 your first favorite, most reliable social marketing tool.
But in the short term, we clearly have some work to do with both the application and the support infrastructure.
Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience associated with this situation.
Update 04-29-2014: The team is back up and running! We are discussing the problem and solution now.
Update 05-03-2014: While we have fixed this issue for many users, some are still experiencing problems. We feel that we have traced it to a server issue, or more specifically, a server load issue. We have added a lot more load to the server with our new users and increased usage among existing users. To help address (and hopefully solve) the issue, we are moving to a super high powered Amazon cloud server — it will start at near the top of their performance ratings and will be easy to scale to accommodate future growth.