As many of you are well aware Twitter was down for just about all of yesterday evening. While as many correctly note that some of this outtage was planned, the vast majority of it was not. This prompted Ev Williams (founder of Twitter) to post an update/apology this morning and declare them back online – the problem of course is that they are not in fact back online.

Certainly regular maintenance of your system is understandable, but it seems like Twitter is in a perpetual state of maintenance and still goes down every time there is adversity – begging the question, are all of these small maintenance jobs actually even worth it?

I can only hope that if, like Ev says, they have finished a “major infrastructure project” with these latest rounds of updates, this latest series will all be more a lot more than naught. In the coming weeks we have Super Tuesday, the Super Bowl, and then of course SXSW which propelled Twitter into stardom last year. I think it’s absolutely imperative that Twitter be available for each of these events – or they could really risk mutiny, not just a lot of talk about mutiny.

Twitter is a service, and while all services face some downtime, it’s very important that they maintain the perception of reliability. Twitter is walking a very dangerous line right now of losing that – and no amount of cute system-down graphics will replace it. People will only be burned so many times before they step away from the fire.

[UPDATE]: Twitter is back up as of 11am PST, hopefully for good.