Twitter's had three big bug outbreaks in the last week. But it's too important now to be broken.
Twitter wants to be part of the basic infastructure of the internet, part of the system — that is, so fundamental that you can't imagine an internet without it. Like search. (Imagine the internet with no Google or Yahoo or Bing. Hard, right?) And I don't think it's much of a stretch to suppose that it is on its way to being vital on that level to the way we internet. (Yes I just used internet as a verb.) Which is totally cool. But the system isn't allowed to break.
Twitter's had two major — well, let's say medium — problems in the last week. First, it had to temporarily shut down TweetDeck — a service that is kind of like Twitter in its freebase form for power users — after "a bug that caused a very small number of TweetDeck users to have access to other TweetDeck users’ accounts." Second, over the weekend, the "Connect" tab wouldn't update for a ton of people using the official iOS and Android app. Also, apparently I've been on Twitter and people have been following me since 1969. (Update: Oh and I forgot about the unfollow bug! Three strikes.)
The official fix for the Connect bug is to log out and log back in again. Simple. Annoying, but simple. However, you can't simply log out of the iOS app. Twitter is part of iOS. It's integrated. You have to delete the account (or accounts) off of your phone, and then re-add them. What makes a relatively minor bug so problematic, both semantically and functionally, is precisely the fact that Twitter is part of the system.
