TinyURL outage illustrates the fragility of the web 20 Nov 2007

Read/Write Web reports that TinyURL - the immensely popular link-shortening service - went down for a few hours on Sunday night / Monday morning. As a result, countless links were broken across the web / blogosphere, with many large sites affected (notably Twitter, which automatically turns user linkage into TinyURLs). Since TinyURL links are clicked on 1.6 billion times each month, you can imagine the chaos that this glitch created!

This outage highlights the fragility of the web: while we like to think of it as being a massively decentralised set of resources, in reality there are still many bottlenecks. And any one of these bottlenecks has the ability to bring our online experience to a standstill. What's the answer? Well, in the case of TinyURL, we'll need to replace these types of public (i.e. centralised) link-shortening services with lots of private link-shortening services. In other words, we'll need to encourage every site to install its own, dedicated link-shortening service (thereby creating the mass decentralisation that we're lacking). Alternatively, we could try to persuade site owners to make use of existing distributed tools like Purl.org (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) from the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)...although, as Read/Write Web points out, the "user experience there is something only a librarian would put up with".