AIM Outage?!? Panic at Javamancy

These days, a lot of people are raving (and sometimes even ranting) about Twitter. But several years ago, after E-mail was “acknowledged” as the Web’s super-app, AOL’s [TWX] instant messenger service was the new front-runner for super-app status. Sure, there was that massive dilution/fragmentation of IM users between AIM and all of the the rest. But many news outlets kept saying that AIM was still the biggest IM service, based upon the total number of active subscribers and daily traffic.

So it was quite a shock this morning (around 8:15 AM, to be a bit more precise) to be passing by the Mac Pro and seeing the familiar buddy list replaced by the AIM login panel, requesting that I enter my password. That only happens in Adium when it loses the IM connection to the service and wants me to re-establish my credentials. After several attempts at trying to re-login via Adium, I fired up a Web browser and hit aol.com to see if I could reset any hijinks with any flaky SNS tokens and thereby get back into AIM. Unfortunately, while I did get into aol.com and was able to verify that at least the E-mail service was operational, I was still unable to log into AIM from the common panel.

So I was left with just waiting it out…

And AIM eventually came back several minutes later (around 8:30-ish)… But, that was a frantic several minutes!

N.B.

In case you’re wondering: yes, those are actual AOL-AIM T-shirts that are hanging in one of my closets. I never realized that the logo on the back of one of them (the left one) matches the front of another (the right one). It was just fortuitous that the two happened to be hanging adjacent to each other today.

I was actually looking for a fresh T-shirt this morning during the AIM outage… curious that I noticed this, right?

Other title candidates were:

• AIM Outage
• Outrageous AIM Outage
• AIM Outage (for Me)
• AIM Outage? Boo!

Tagged as: AIM, AOL, Twitter