Twitter goes down, users 'tweet' about it

October 8, 2009

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The frontpage of Twitter. Twitter was down for many users on Thursday and the hot micro-blogging service said it was trying to fix the problem.

Twitter went down on Thursday prompting devotees of the micro-blogging service to share how they coped without it.

"I WAS FORCED TO TEXT MSG," lamented a user named "Misskette."

"I found a life," tweeted "JeremyTaylor09."

"I coped with my Twitter withdrawal by screaming what I was doing at the top of my lungs," said "MoL42."

"JPreister" said she "got more work done this afternoon than like ever."

The philosophical "PBHouse" mused: "If you tweet and Twitter is frozen does it make a sound?"

The political "Watchj" said: "I'm sure the Republicans will find some way to blame this on Obama."

Many Twitter users stopped receiving the 140-character-or-less messages known as "tweets" shortly before 11:00 am (1500 GMT) and did not regain normal service until several hours later.

When "tweets" began to flow normally again, the top "trending topic" on Twitter was users telling others what they did "when Twitter was down."

The San Francisco-based company explained the disruption as a "bug" in one of the "core services that powers Twitter."

Twitter last month closed a deal for "significant" new financing despite having yet to show how it is going to make money.

It did not reveal the amount of the funding but The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times put the figure at up to 100 million dollars and said it valued Twitter at one billion dollars.

Twitter has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 and claims to have topped 50 million users.

Twitter last suffered a major disruption in August when it came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack along with Facebook and other social networking sites.

The accounts of a pro-Georgian blogger were identified as the target of the DDoS attacks believed to be an attempt to silence his online criticism of Moscow's role in last year's Georgia-Russia war.

Classic DDoS attacks involve legions of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, which are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers.

(c) 2009 AFP