It seems like a week just isn't complete if Twitter doesn't malfunction in some way, or give users a few hiccups along the way. Twitter's newest clash with stability has taken the form of a partial stumble. In short, it seems to be working only part of the time.
If your incoming Twitter stream seemed a little quiet this weekend, but the service still appeared operational, we assure you that your mind wasn't playing tricks. Just enough Tweets were getting through to make you think the site was working, but if you clicked through to some of your friends, you would see some of their published messages got through to Twitter - only they may not have gotten through to you. Mashable associate editor Paul Glazowski put a question to me yesterday in conversation, asking if Twitter was hobbled or broken again. Evidently, he hadn't seen a new message from outside sources arrive in his stream in 12-hours. My response was that I myself found it to be working, because I still seemed to be getting messages, but it now appears I was only getting a portion of all messages published by those people I follow. Further proof of a disruption comes from Jonathan Skillings of Webware, who says today that the partial blockage of messages apparently was the norm for many other Twitter users, too.
It seems this all stems from some work they were doing behind-the-scenes at Twitter, and, according to an official representative, has something to do with a recent maintenance window. When they made some changes to the way the system handles its cache, which is said to make the system more stable overall, the backend activity evidently had some side-effects they didn't foresee.
The Twitter folk do seem to be working on the problem, but there is no word on when they think it will be fixed. They apparently thought they had it licked at one point, but then backtracked a few hours later to say they realized it was still broken, and were working on a fix once again. Of course, as always, the system will return to normal in relatively short order. But for now, you may have to subsist only on a trickle of tweets rather than the torrent you're often used to.
In the meantime, why not (try to) follow your favorite Mashable crew members?