Sleepless in the Beltway: A Tale of Twitter, Facebook, Earthquakes and Insomnia

Last night I could not sleep for the life of me.  So, I decided to be productive and work on a few blog posts as well as check in with my tweeps on Twitter and my friends on Facebook.  Being in the beltway I was unaffected by last night's SoCal earthquake, however, a few other problems stood in my way.

#1- Twitter was acting up.  Tweets and DMs would not go through.  The whale was up and down and up and down.  All of my old tweets disappeared, leaving only a message for my followers to nudge me to tweet.  (How ironic is that?)  And although purportedly the tweets were not posting, in reality tweets were being posted multiple times (I woke up this morning with several repeats of the same tweet.)

#2- Facebook was acting up as well.  Although I did not experience the brunt of it, I saw others post stories of their suffering. 

#3- To top it all off, my Sprint overdrive device was acting up and not working for the second time in the last few days. 

NYCityMama tweeted:

Facebook is out of whack and Twitter keeps crashing.  Kiss and hug your loved ones y'all.  The world is ending.

When the news of the SoCal earthquake came in by way of FB of course I put it all in perspective.  Although there have been no injuries from the earthquake reported to date, a 5.9 earthquake is much more serious than a Twitter fail whale.  However, it was obvious to everyone myself included how inextricably our life, social circles and consumption of information news and otherwise are tied to these new technologies.  The exercise is no longer hypothetical.