If you haven’t heard by now, TinyURL has gone down. The popular URL shortening service went down sometime in the night, and has yet to come back up yet. With so many services depending on the free TinyURL service, I am surprised that it has been down for so long.

When Text Link Ads decided they were going to use TinyURL for their referral links, most likely in an attempt to hide the links from Google’s eyes, I was shaking my head. Never trust a free service as a layer between yourself and your customers. Currently, if you click on a referral link on a blog, it gives you a pretty 404 page not found error. This outage also effects the very popular Twitter service which currently uses TinyURL to shorten URL’s automatically.

Sure it can be nice to use a free service to make your business better, but there should be a system in place for when it goes down. I recommend those that are using the system like Text Link Ads, and Twitter, invest in TinyURL if you are going to continue to use it, as outages like this don’t just make TinyURL look bad, but also the companies that depend on it.

Twitter could have easily avoided this problem by building in a fail safe system to check TinyURL and make sure it is up, if not, then use one of its many competitors during the outage. A simple and effective fix that TinyURL might not really like, but it would make the user experience seamless, which would make Twitter look good.

If you are going to use a free system, make sure there are things in place to deal with faults, as services you depend on may not always be available, and can ruin how people view your business.

Update: TinyURL is back up and running with no word excusing the outage.