Twitter is down, and so goes the world.

It's a sad state of my own personal world when a social networking/microblogging site goes down, and I am distraught. Anytime the internet stops working in my presence, I always have to research the downtime's cause. It's because I'm a librarian, I'm sure. Infinite thirst for knowledge and all that. But this morning's twitter outage brought with it a realization: When your job is so immersed in the internet, (as is the modern public librarian), loss of internet resources affects your ability to do your job. Granted, twitter isn't exactly a research resource, for the most part (though I do use it to find new and exciting craft projects!), but it is a major website. And in the library world, whenever anything doesn't work, patrons expect the librarian to be able to fix it. Luckily, none of my library kids are avid tweeters, so I don't have to worry about explaining the downtime. But what about when Google fails? One Saturday last spring I was working on the children's reference desk, and every website i searched for through Google came up as a potentially harmful site, and became impossible to reach through the links Google provided. Granted, it isn't as huge a failure as unplanned downtime but it certainly took away the usefulness of Google. I had to use yahoo (cue shock and awe face).

For reference, the twitter downtime is the result of a denial of service attack. The Tech Crunch blog insinuates that the website is back up, but I haven't had any luck. Neither has my new favorite internet resource, down for everyone or just me.

So, until next time, kids. And I hope my next blog post will come before the next internet fail.