Is Twitter Down?

UPDATE: Our long international nightmare is over. Or at least, it appears to be getting better: Twitter seems to be functioning normally now. For me, at least.

Unless the 400 or more people I follow on Twitter have all gone mute at the same time, I suspect that something’s wrong with Twitter, since I haven’t seen a new message for the last hour or so. A quick scan of Facebook–and Twitter’s own search engine–indicates that other people are seeing the same thing: We’re tweeting, it appears, but into a void. How meta!

Twitter’s status site, designed just for instances like these, has a message it says is 16 hours old: “We’re currently diagnosing the causes of an unplanned site outage that happened a few minutes ago. We are recovering from this issue now and apologize for the interruption in service.”

Twitter now acknowledges there is a current problem: “We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed. We will update with status here shortly.”

I’m confident we’ll survive this crisis if we all band together. And perhaps go out for a walk–it’s really nice today in New York.

The semi-serious point here is that this stuff used to happen to Twitter all the time, and happens much less now. But the pressure is on Twitter–users are increasing, and so are expectations–to make these outages even less frequent.

Counterpoint: Even mighty Google (GOOG) is prone to this kind of thing.