Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down

I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" <i>n</i> characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?

Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener?<p>How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down?<p>It's a centralized service, things happen.

When a HN twitter bot has tweeted this story, I actually clicked on the link.<p>Genius.

Looks like a DNS failure, so adding 199.59.148.12 to your hosts file gives you working t.co links again.

It's also listed in Spamhaus <a href="http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co" rel="nofollow">http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co</a> - so it could be someone's filter going nuts over that.<p>Funny recommendation there:<p>"If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request."<p>:)

I find my Twitter useless now (although I can still copy links). It's amazing to see how Twitter has become my information/discovery network. I use Facebook just to browse pictures and other casual stuff shared by my friends/family.<p>Twitter can kill Flipboard and other tons of "discovery engines" with one flip. I think Twitter has figured out this stuff couple of years back and that's what they are doing. A real-time discovery network. It is more powerful than any of the existing old mediums, be it newspapers or TV networks.<p>EDIT: It also makes extremely powerful advertising medium.

I'm sure someone is having an interesting conversation right now. Twitter needs to stop having these embarrassing down-ages if they want to be a permanent player in the tech field.

And nothing of value... /snark

Thankfully the Internet has a pretty short term memory.

Seems to be back up: <a href="https://t.co/uHJO6BCr" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/uHJO6BCr</a>

Internal sources say t.co went down due to registrar error, which is highly unfortunate for Twitter as this was something out of their control.

For most Twitter's users, it is not a mission critical service.<p>It could be regularly down for hours at a time with little to no effect.<p>They'll just come back later.

Its surprising to see that thenextweb has written such a long article about t.co being down.<p>i guess its easy to write up stuff :))

Related: OSX twitter integration seems broken for me? I can't tweet from Safari or other apps.

I dont think its controlling satellites - its twitter...everybody chill