During the last half an hour Twitter is down. It's hit by a denial of service attack.

And when Twitter is down, there is no way to quickly say to the entire world that Twitter's down.

Actually, to put it properly, there is no way to broadcast (push) this message.

But the good news is the some nice fellow create a very simple and cute Web page that answers ( in three characters or less) just one question, "Is Twitter down?", which at this very moment shows a large red

Yes

In general, creating such a simple Yes/No site can save lots of money to the vendors of any other commercial software. Say, your firm runs an e-commerce Web site  GreatOnlineStore.com.  When your server is down, the phone lines of your customer support  get swamped (and you pay for all these 800 numbers!). Frustrated customer keep banging your server getting errors back...What a mess....

You could have avoided this by running a simple Web site IsGreatOnlineStoreDown.com, which would put the minds of frustrated customers at ease - people can survive for an hour without your GreatOnlineStore, but what's most important, this red Yes will give them a feeling that everything is under control. They know what's going on!

Think about it. I'm not kidding.