The Twitter web site went down about 12:20 PM (EST) on July 2, 2010.
Visitors were met with the web site's usual "Twitter is over capacity" message. According to their Twitter Status page, they are "Investigating Elevated Error Rates." This is based on reports they have received from users.
It is not usual for the very popular web site to go down. But normally the site is only down for a minutes, or in localized areas. At this point it seems to be an extended outage. In addition to the web site itself, it seems other means of accessing the Twitter service have also shut down. These include Smart Phone Apps and text messaging.
We will continue to monitor the situation and report.
UPDATE: 12:50PM EST July 2, 2010
Twitter acknowledges they are experiencing "unplanned downtime." They are working on the problem.
UPDATE: 01:04PM EST July 2, 2010
Twitter engineers have restore the web site from the "unplanned downtime."
UPDATE: 01:09PM EST July 2, 2010
After a very short return the site has gone back down... and this time into a deeper hole. As I mentioned about, when Twitter has problems it usually displays the Twitter is Over Capacity message, with art work of the Twitter birds carrying a large Whale. But at this time some visitors are getting a very plain 404 Error:
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an Error Document to handle the request.
404 Error result when a visitor attempts to visit a web site or web page, and the server that handles the information is either shut down, offline, or the information simply does not exist on the server.
This looks to be an extended issue Twitter will be dealing with, at least for the near future.
UPDATE: 02:00PM EST July 2, 2010
Twitter is back up and working again. Users were very upset over the outage, which may have been caused by a massive increase in tweets because of the World Cup Match between the Netherlands and Brazil.
Due to the massive volume of World Cup tweets, Twitter created a special web site to handle and display the live tweets from around the world. Chick here for a link to the site.
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