Late last week a very serious outage occurred. Serious because it was an intentional outage created by a service provider and impacting its API users.
By the time the weekend was out, service was partially restored. But, if I were betting my business on someone else’s infrastructure I’d definitely have a plan B.
The service provider was Twitter. The company taken to the floor was UberMedia.
Twitter suspended three very popular UberMedia Twitter clients saying they’d been in discussions with the company to fix T&C violations since April 2010. UberMedia’s CEO denies that Twitter notified the company of the violations. Toptechreviews.net suggests that it’s related to Twitter’s promotion of their own mobile solution (not nearly as good in my experience).
Regardless of the reason, UberMedia’s whole business appears to be based on Twitter apps. Twitter effectively shut them down for two days. And, that should keep the CEO up at night.
Any company building apps on someone else’s API had better have a plan B. You can get shut down, the API provider can get acquired, or they can simply change their Terms & Conditions any time they want like Facebook is doing to Google.
What’s your Plan B?