Twitter Failures are news?

There's a techmeme storm about the latest issues with Twitter, but I'm baffled as to why anyone thinks this is new. I've been running Twitterific regularly for a couple months now, and I get this all the time:

The only thing that varies is the text for the error - I get failure notices multiple times a day, and have been getting them since I started paying attention to Twitter again. Why is anyone acting like this is a new problem?

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media