Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail
Whether or not Twitter is more or less reliable than any similar alternative doesn't really matter that much, especially if none of the alternatives offer anything more than best-effort service with no guarantee of reliability.
The fact that Twitter was (at least superficially) suitable for this sort of application was probably not intended by Twitter's developers, nor was the existence of the pathological corner case that ruined OP's fish tank anything more than a unfortunate coincidence.
It absolutely sucks that OP's fish died, but if Twitter explicitly disavows any sort of loss because of the possibility that their service might change or fail, it's doesn't seem reasonable to just ignore that and assume otherwise. Especially for an application where it doesn't matter if the service is up most of the time if it ends up failing during the brief period where it's needed the most. And if you are aware of the limitations of some aspect of your system, it then becomes possible to design redundancy into the other parts to compensate. I hope OP's next fishtank adventure keeps this in mind.
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Whether or not Twitter is more or less reliable than any similar alternative doesn't really matter that much, especially if none of the alternatives offer anything more than best-effort service with no guarantee of reliability.
The fact that Twitter was (at least superficially) suitable for this sort of application was probably not intended by Twitter's developers, nor was the existence of the pathological corner case that ruined OP's fish tank anything more than a unfortunate coincidence.
It absolutely sucks that OP's fish died, but if Twitter explicitly disavows any sort of loss because of the possibility that their service might change or fail, it's doesn't seem reasonable to just ignore that and assume otherwise. Especially for an application where it doesn't matter if the service is up most of the time if it ends up failing during the brief period where it's needed the most. And if you are aware of the limitations of some aspect of your system, it then becomes possible to design redundancy into the other parts to compensate. I hope OP's next fishtank adventure keeps this in mind.