First of all, gladlyCast users’ tweets has been delayed from around 6 to 11 pm on Oct 18, Malaysian / Singapore time. This has been partially resolved. Your tweets may not be delivered orderly. Read on if you’re interested in what occurred or if you like bad art.

At around 7:30 pm, we noticed every tweet we attempted to send out failed. We did some troubleshooting and discovered one of the nodes in between gladlyCast and Twitter wasn’t functioning normally. This is a rough diagram to show you what went wrong — the route between gladlyCast and Twitter has been disrupted:

We got a little relieved knowing other Twitter services such as TwitPic are also having similar network issues. When we are quite certain one of the nodes of Twitter’s provider NTT America has failed, we tweeted a short explanation:

It’s 10 pm and the route between gladlyCast and Twitter is unlikely to recover soon. However not all routes are affected, we can successful update Twitter using one of our laptops.

We decided to implement a temporary measure to pull all the tweets from our outbox into one of our laptops. This laptop then acts as the server to Twitter, creating a successful alternate route. The network diagram looks something like that:

At 11 pm, we successfully sent out the first tweet with one of our laptops. We finally got the time to read your responses. We got some angry tweets, we got some nice ones too. We understand how timely each SMS update means to you and are just as frustrated as you are over the issue.

Twitter acknowledged the issue couple hours later. We still hope Twitter fixes the problem soon so that we can give the poor laptop proper rest it much deserved.

We wrote this to share with you some issues that can occur when we deliver a tweet. We dedicate this entry to one of our users avaricedevil who wanted to know more on running a web server.

The Singapore SMS device was malfunctioned this morning. We did not get notified until @chrissyypoo alerted us. Sorry for the delayed messages, we have successfully delivered all delayed messages from Singapore.

We are currently investigating what went wrong and update you guys on what actually occurred.

The Singapore SMS feature is up and will be monitored closely.

Update: A glitch occurred on the software that checks the SMS device and it stops checking for new messages until we restarted it.

Due to the recent Twitter attacks, Twitter is redirecting traffic away. This pending update takes care of the redirection to increase reliability. gladlyCast will be up again on today (Aug 10), 1:15 am. This minor update does not affect your SMSes, however, your updates to Twitter will be delayed till 1:15 am. Please be patient.

Update 1:11 am: Core Twitter service updated. Now testing update.

Update 1:27 am: Everything is back up.

Oh and by the way, if you’re having problems with signing in with Twitter and happen to have a 3G modem, use it to sign in. The sign in problem is partly due to SingNet or Starhub. You can then use back your normal internet connection to access Twitter subsequently.