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Bit.ly back up and running following outage

The link-shortening service was down for a while last night, but is now operating normally.

Don Reisinger
CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
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Don Reisinger
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Bit.ly was down last night.
Bit.ly was down last night.

Link-shortening service Bit.ly was down for a period of time last night, but the service appears to be working just fine now.

Last night, CNET editors found first that Bit.ly links were not working and then that all of Bit.ly seemed to be down. A quick search on Twitter reveals that some others had also been affected by the outage.

"Is Bit.ly down for anyone else or just me?" one Twitter user asked late last night. Another user quickly followed that up, saying "For the first time I can remember, Bit.ly is down. Life is now difficult--where are we supposed to shorten our monster links?!"

Related stories:
• Bit.ly gets a new boss
• Google's 'goo.gl' URL shortener open to the public
• Twitter tests own own URL shortener

Although there are a slew of link shorteners on the Web, Bit.ly is one of the most prominent. In addition to crunching many links shared on Twitter, the service also powers over 10,000 custom URLs for several companies, including Pepsi, Yahoo, and others. Earlier this year, AllThingsD reported that Bit.ly delivers over 8 billion links to users each month.

Though Bit.ly has so far not commented on the extent of last night's outage, the fact that it went down for a period of time seems to play into Google's favor. Earlier this year, Google launched its own shortener, called "goo.gl." Following its announcement, Google's Matt Cuts cited competing services, like Bit.ly, that come from small firms as the inspiration for its own service. Casting doubt on the long-term financial health of those small companies, Cutt said that the search company built its own shortener "for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn't go away."

Other link shorteners have made news recently. Last week, not-for-profit organization Spamhaus, which tracks the Web's spam "operations and sources," put shortener ow.ly on its spam blocklist. The organization said ow.ly is a "spammer-abused URL shortener and redirector."

Bit.ly did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.