AllThingsD » Fail Whale

Former Palm and Twitter Techie Mike Abbott Jumps From EIR at Benchmark to Kleiner Partner

Kara Swisher — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:00:03 +0000

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

Exclusive: Twitter's VP Engineering Mike Abbott Departs

Kara Swisher — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:49:32 +0000

According to sources close to the situation, Twitter VP of Engineering Mike Abbott has left the company.

He is apparently interested in doing more investing.

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed the departure in a statement, noting that Abbott was joining Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is on the Twitter board.

“We can confirm that Mike Abbott is no longer with Twitter. Mike will be available to assist the company in his new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. We thank Mike for his leadership in growing an outstanding team of engineers from 100 to 400 that have successfully taken on the unique challenge of making Twitter reliable and stable. While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter grew from handling 55 million tweets a day to 230 million. Twitter is focused on aggressively moving forward to fulfill the profound opportunities that are in front of us.”

Said Fenton:

“What Mike Abbott accomplished at Twitter is nothing short of heroic, when Benchmark introduced him to the company we felt he had the courage and entrepreneurial drive to build a strong engineering foundation. Today we applaud him for that extraordinary accomplishment. As we continue to work closely with the team at Twitter, we’re delighted to welcome Mike to Benchmark as an entrepreneur in residence. Mike will not only continue to lend his considerable talents to supporting the team at Twitter, but as a true entrepreneur at heart, will undoubtedly be an incredible asset to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio overall.”]

The move feels sudden, but sources said it has been brewing for a while and happened several days ago.

Abbott was a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS platform.

He was brought in to bring a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which was plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

In large part, Abbott has done that, as Twitter has grown significantly. It now has 230 million tweets per day, he said in a recent interview.

Twitter does not have a replacement as yet, sources said.

Twitter Brags of Successful Data Center Migration

Liz Gannes — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:30:56 +0000

Twitter, after years of fighting the Fail Whale, has recently made major changes under the hood to ensure its messaging service will stay online. Its engineering and operations teams coordinated a massive effort starting last September to migrate Twitter not once, but twice, shifting 20 TB of tweets and live traffic-serving from a first data center to a second testing center to its third “final nesting ground.”

Over the last couple months in particular, I’ve heard murmurs through the grapevine of Twitter engineers boasting as shifts happened with no disruption to the service.

Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott publicly bragged about the migration today in a blog post, but declined to disclose where the data center musical chairs actually occurred, or why multiple moves were necessary.

Since 2008, the company–which coincidentally is celebrating the five-year anniversary of the first tweet today–2008 had been using NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services, which has a data center in San Jose, Calif., and later expanded to Santa Clara. In July 2010, Twitter said it would move into a custom-built data center in Salt Lake City before the end of that year.

But that didn’t happen, and in December, Twitter reportedly leased data center space in Sacramento.

In a rare sentence that didn’t include a bird metaphor (flocking! nesting! migration!), Abbott described the implications of the data center move in his blog post: “This move gives us the capacity to deliver Tweets with greater reliability and speed, and creates more runway to focus on the most interesting operations and engineering problems.”

It's a New Day, So NewEnterprise Is Here

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:10:45 +0000

Welcome to NewEnterprise, the latest in the ever-growing stable of offerings at All Things Digital.

I am Arik Hesseldahl and I’ll be following the world of information technology with an emphasis on the enterprise. This is a deliberately loose definition that encompasses a lot, so I expect I’ll have a lot of room to roam.

Consider for a minute all the different threads that can reasonably fall under the umbrella term “Enterprise IT”: Everyone loves Twitter and Facebook and Google, but when some part of them fails to work right, phrases like “Fail Whale” enter the popular lexicon, and careers, reputations and investments are all at risk.

When they do work, the people who assembled all the hardware and software become the unsung heroes. I’m fascinated by both scenarios, because in their own way they’re both great stories that others can learn from.

You can expect me to pay a great deal of attention to developments in the burgeoning cloud computing industry, and in the traditional enterprise IT business of selling computers and other products and services to large companies.

Beyond that I’ll be looking deeper at the chips and other components inside them, and the companies and people who make them.

And I’ll also be keeping an eye on issues relating to computer and network security, an issue that has suddenly taken on significant heft, as computer worms have evolved from stealing credit card numbers to attacking nuclear plants.

Plus, I’ll be on the lookout for new start-ups aiming to change the way things are done in the workplace.

I’ve covered technology for more than a decade, most recently for Bloomberg Businessweek, and for Forbes.com before that. In those years I’ve learned to treat buzzwords and hype cycles with suspicion and to question the so-called conventional wisdom wherever possible.

So, I promise to tell you what I think is going on in straight and simple terms, and in a jargon-free manner.

In short, I think we’ll have a great deal to talk about. And that’s where you come in. I’d like to hear from you. Give me feedback. Tell me what I’ve missed and where I could do better and also whether or not you agree with what I’m saying, or where you think the next important story is.

Leave a comment here or send an email (Arik@AllThingsD.com).

What I need most are thoughtful ideas and feedback from the people on the front lines at tech companies, and those making tech-related decisions at non-tech companies.

Remember those unsung heroes I mentioned before? They’re you. And NewEnterprise is nothing without you.

Yahoo's Outage: Not-So-Perfect Timing

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:32:53 +0000

Yahoo is never down.

So the fact that its massive Web site is showing a “server outage” sign and little else is pretty astonishing.

And not in a good way, since the company is in the midst of a swirl of takeover rumors, executive turmoil and worries about weak earnings next week.

But, until now, Yahoo’s powerful homepage always works, especially compared to other Web sites. Over its long history, in fact, it has been the polar opposite of Fail-Whaling Twitter.

BoomTown is awaiting info from Yahoo PR, which acknowledged “periodic outages.” It is still down for me and many others who have emailed

But the Silicon Valley company has no specifics as yet, beyond this statement to the media:

“For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected.”

Here is a screenshot we just took:

Twitter's COO Dick Costolo Talks About Management, Monetization and IPO Cravings!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:00:49 +0000

Yesterday, BoomTown headed to the well-appointed downtown San Francisco HQ of Twitter as part of a renewed quest that I have dubbed “Meet the Twits.”

No, really! Since Twitter has been on a significant hiring spree for all kinds of execs and staffers–it now has almost 250 employees–I have been in need of some serious meeting and greeting to see what’s going on there at the microblogging kingpin.

In fact, on my way to chat with COO Dick Costolo and Vice President of Engineering Michael Abbott–newly arrived from Palm and going full Ahab on the fail whale–I ran into former Google (GOOG) exec and spanking-new Twitter international head Katie Stanton and February-appointed CFO Ali Rowghani, formerly of Pixar.

It’s exec-mania over there!

Thus, the first place to start had to be a chit-chat with Costolo, who is about to have his one-year anniversary at Twitter as No. 2 to CEO and co-founder Evan Williams.

Costolo, as anyone who knows him well will tell you, is a very funny guy and also pretty forthright on what’s happening at Twitter.

He’d know, of course, as an early adviser and investor at the start-up–who came to Twitter rather suddenly after leaving Google, which had bought Costolo’s Feedburner.

Here’s the interview I did with Costolo, in which he talks about new execs, promoted tweets and trends, what’s next for the Silicon Valley darling and also the false, but funny, rumor of an IPO “craving” he has:

[ See post to watch video ]

(You can also click here to see MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka’s video interview with Costolo in April about its ad business and his thoughts on Twitter’s third-party developers.)

Twitter Down Again? Yep.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:16:17 +0000

Remember when we thought Twitter’s Fail Whale days were over? Sigh.

A quick public service message: If you want to know whether Twitter is really down or if there’s a problem on your end, it’s probably the former. At least this month. But you can check for yourself over here: http://status.twitter.com/

For the record, here’s the current update (it’s not you):

Twitter Can't Promise It Will Stay Up During the World Cup

Peter Kafka — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:00:39 +0000

All those World Cup tweets you saw today? They’re not going to stop. And if they increase dramatically, well…Twitter can’t make any promises.

That info comes at the bottom of a new blog post the service put up explaining its downtime problems this past week. If you’re technically savvy, it might be meaningful for you. (My caveman translation attempt: Twitter say internal network bad. Twitter sorry. Twitter fix.)

But this is the part you’ll want to think about if you’re planning on tweeting about Wayne Rooney’s temper tomorrow:

As more people turn to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world (or in the World Cup), you may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic. For instance, during the World Cup tournament–and particularly during big, closely-watched matches (such as tomorrow’s match between England and the U.S.A.)–we anticipate a significant surge in activity on Twitter. While we are making every effort to prepare for that surge, the whale may surface.

As Twitter notes, the fail whale shows up much less frequently than it used to. And the World Cup is a really, really big deal. So your inclination should probably be to cut the service some slack–and you certainly can’t demand a refund.

But if it breaks down at a particularly crucial time, you’re still going to want to give Twitter a red card. Or worse.

Twitter Still Attracting New Users, Phishers

Peter Kafka — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:33:32 +0000

Twitter’s astonishing growth doesn’t just generate awe and giant valuations, it attracts scammers who want to prey on the service’s ever-expanding user base.

The most recent example: A new wave of phishing attacks, which are generally–but not always–sent via the service’s “direct message” feature. And which generally–but not always–feature language like “LOL is this you” in the message.

Like most phishing attacks, this one has some telltale signs, if you’re the kind of person who’s inclined to see them. There’s the odd text in the message itself. And the “bzpharma” text that appears in the URL address is a big giveaway.

But! As with many other phishing attacks, if you’re not looking for this stuff or you’re just clicking quickly, it’s easy enough to get duped. The fake Twitter homepage created by the phishers looks real enough, as does the “fail whale” message you get after entering your info.

One easy step you can take to arm yourself against this kind of thing: Follow Twitter’s “Spam Watch” account, which does a decent job of keeping people informed attacks like these. But while that account has 148,368 followers, and tends to get retweeted a lot, the majority of Twitter users still won’t learn about this stuff in advance. Maybe it’s time for Twitter to build some equivalent of the emergency broadcast system.

Meanwhile, if you don’t like reading, the video below from the Sophos security firm (via Mashable) gives you a good idea of what this is all about.

How Can We Miss Fail Whale if It Won't Go Away? (Twitter Down) UPDATED

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:23:29 +0000

Twitter went down early this morning, as you can see from the picture of the infamous fail whale below, which is now gracing the microblogging site’s front page.

A message read: “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

UPDATE: It’s back!

Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the 90-minute outage: “A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.”

BoomTown Decodes Twitter's Denial-of-Service Blog Post (So You Don't Have To)

Kara Swisher — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:17:56 +0000

This morning, in a blog post titled “The Adventure Continues,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone gave more of an explanation for the outage that the microblogging service endured due to a denial-of-service attack yesterday.

Fortunately, BoomTown can read between the lines in order to decipher the secret message herein!

Biz wrote: The Adventure Continues.

Translation: By “adventure,” I mean yet-another-friggin’-Twitter-birdie-crisis.

Considering all the fail whales, the stolen documents and now this, I would have to say we have now taken Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL’s title as Internet company most likely to experience technical difficulties. Do not adjust your screens! Please stand by!

Biz wrote: In the past 24 hours, we’ve been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity. We’re working to restore access to apps built on the Twitter platform that were affected by defensive measures–there was some overcompensation on our part as we tune our system to deal with this scale of attack.

Translation: We’d like to blame this one on TechCrunch somehow, and are hard at work on another impolitic internal memo about how to do so that also manages to insult potential acquirers, such as Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and our investors.

The reason we doused this crisis with extra amounts of weed killer is because no one will be able to accuse us of sitting by in our usual chill manner, which is exemplified by the official Twitter company motto: “Scoble dude, relax, it’s only 140 characters.”

Biz wrote: The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation. However, we don’t feel it’s appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations. The open exchange of information can have a positive impact globally and our job is to keep Twitter services running reliably to the best of our ability.

Translation: And if blaming TechCrunch does not work, there is always Iran to point the finger at!

However, we don’t feel it’s appropriate to engage in speculative discussion of these motivations–mostly because it will just piss off the hackers more and they will crush our little technical operation like it is papier maché.

Which, let’s be honest, it is. Anybody got any spare Elmer’s Glue?

Biz wrote: As a reminder, no data or personal information of any kind has been compromised. Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon. Nevertheless, we can and will improve system response to these assaults such that they don’t interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering.

Translation: No data or personal information of any kind have been compromised, except–of course–for Ashton Kuchter’s.

But, to be fair, that dude overshares like Perez and Paris Hilton combined and on steroids.

Not that we mind him tweeting pictures of his wife’s posterior, but he makes John Mayer seem shy.

Denial-of-service attacks are a known quantity on the Web, much the way our fail whale is.

Nevertheless, we can and will fail again, so there will be yet another spate of articles and blog posts about the indignity of life without Twittering to show just how indispensable we are.

I Can't Believe I Am Now Following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter (Though His Smackdown of CNN Was Sweet)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:36:16 +0000

Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel went over the million mark soon after, but still a clear second.

Here is a pix, below, from Twitter HQ of the Kutcher win, on its database (courtesy of Twitter’s Jessica Verrilli).

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

That would be Kutcher vs. CNN.

CNN was all over the issue on airwaves tonight touting its Twitter feed, because–you know–there is no more important news to cover, like the weak economy or anything.

And at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, staff was up monitoring the race to one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Kutcher is scheduled to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later today, along with Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, when the talk show host will do her first tweet.

Oprah, of course, will get to one million users in 4.67 seconds, which is making everyone on Twitter worry about the looming Fail Whale of all time.

(Oprah Friend-in-Chief Gayle King is already up and tweeting via @kinggayle–with her first one going over 140 characters, oops, just as we all did.)

In a moment of temporary insanity, BoomTown actually clicked the follow button for Kutcher.

What can I say? I like “Punk’d” and want Larry King to go down like a ton of bricks.

Now I am officially worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (“G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

If you are so inclined, here’s a chart of the situation now from chartbeat, with the numbers ticking up like a clock, which you can track here (click on the chart to make it larger):

While we wait, here is a video of the famous haircutting scene from “G.I. Jane”: