Update: Twitter is back up and running. The Twitter Status blog informs us that Twitter has fallen victim to an ongoing Denial-of-Service attack:
Facebook is also experiencing some glitches. As someone pointed out in the comments of this article:
Twitter is not the only social networking site having problems right now. It took several attempts for me to get into my Facebook account and then I could not share a link or click on links shared by others.
I have also had trouble getting to links provided by friends.
Original Article: While researching a story, I couldn’t help but notice that Twitter was not working. It was timing out. The idea of Twitter not working is certainly not a new concept. In fact, it has kind of become accepted in some strange way and to some extent even celebrated.
You’ve probably seen a fail whale t-shirt somewhere, a reference, of course to the whale that Twitter ordinarly displays when it is experiencing hiccups. No whale in sight this time though. Just a cold error message:
Suddenly Twitter not working doesn’t seem so warm and fuzzy. Twitter Search works though. In fact, the only aspect of Twitter that doesn’t work appears to be the site itself. People are still able to tweet from other devices and applications. Searching for Twitter on Twitter shows that people couldn’t wait to Tweet about Twitter search not working (this is starting to sound like a tongue-twister).
Twitter has acknowledged the problem on the Twitter Status blog, but doesn’t share any clues as to what has caused the issue.
From this experience, I take away two points. The first one is that people freak out when they can’t tweet. The second one is that Twitter’s compatibility with outside apps and devices is a great thing for the company, especially considering that it “fails” so often.
I’m not sure how long exactly Twitter has been down, but it’s been at least a half hour at the time of this writing.
