Twitter offline: Site goes dark on day of big announcement
Outages! They happen.聽And on popular websites, where daily traffic regularly hits hundreds of millions of clicks, they can happen quite often. the Great Gmail Outage of 2012. Or look to Twitter, which today crashed for at least two hours, inspiring what one site has as a "collective Internet freakout." According to , Twitter was offline from around 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern 鈥� years in Twitter time. 聽
Even now, the聽microblogging service seems to be flickering on and offline.
We were able to access our accounts at 2:30, although by 2:50, it was again unreachable. (Now it's back online but sluggish.) So what's causing the problems? Well, initially, some users if the blackout wasn't the result of a hacker attack.
Twitter, for its part, is staying mum: A spokesman told CNN Money that聽"engineers are currently working to resolve the issue," but declined to get more specific than that.聽
In the early days of Twitter, the "fail whale" was a familiar sight. But in 2010, Twitter started聽building, as a Twitter spokesman said at the time, a "more reliable and stable platform"聽鈥� the company moved its base of technical operations to Salt Lake City and greatly increased its server capacity.聽Today's outage is a not-so-pleasant reminder of a past that Twitter would rather forget.聽
In related news, Twitter today that it planned to expand its "promoted tweets" ad platform to 50 countries by the end of the year.聽
"I'm extremely humbled by how quick and broadly Twitter has taken off an how we've done building something independent and timeless? This is a company that will last," Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said at a press conference in Cannes, to The Hollywood Reporter. "Timeless" sounds good, of course, but first Twitter has to actually get back online.聽
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