I‘ve posted a few times over the last couple of weeks about Twitter in general, but mainly about the recent downtime the service has been suffering.

During my evening’s surfing I stumbled across a post on Techcrunch by Nik Cubrilovic that I found very interesting. Nik claims to have spoken to someone who

is familiar with the technical problems at Twitter as well as the challenges that lay ahead for the startup.

and has gleamed an interesting insight into Twitter and the way it works.

Reading the post, Twitter comes across as a startup made up of a handful of people, with just one or two of those people dedicated to infrastructure and architecture.

The source that I spoke to also commented on how ill-prepared the Twitter team were and are for their current and future challenges. The small team contains a handful of engineers, with only a person or two committed to infrastructure and architecture. He goes on to point out that at Digg the team for network and systems alone is bigger than the total engineering team at Twitter, and that at Digg they are lead by well-known “A-list rockstars”.

I’m fairly surprised with this news, as I got the impression the service was run by a much larger company, with perhaps the Twitter team just being one division. I guess Twitter shows how quickly something can grow from nothing to a worldwide phenomena with very little behind it.

The article goes on to attribute many of the downtime problems to the fact Twitter uses RubyOnRails. I don’t pretend to fully understand why this is a bad thing, but it would appear the web development framework is simply not cut out for such an intensive task as constantly updating so many individual users so quickly.

Having said all this, we must remember that whilst it can be quite irritating when we can’t get our Twitter fix, we don’t actually pay anything for the service. Can we really complain when something that’s free breaks? Let me know your thoughts on Twitter and it’s current down, up, down again state in the comments section, or via the Contact page.