Twitter Down: Social Media Site Experiences Worst Crash in 8 Months

Twitter goes down, minds are promptly lost. When the micro-blogging site experienced an hour-long outage this afternoon, I’m sure it caused much fist-shaking and hair-pulling. Outside of a 60 minute outage back in October of 2011, the site has remained fairly consistant. Sure, there are moments when you’ll post something extraordinarily cool and you’ll get to iconic “Fail Whale”, but, for the most part, things run pretty smoothly for those of us who love sharing dumb thoughts with the world.

CNN reports that the outage began at 11:59pm EST, though things were returning to normal around 1pm. Of course, this moment of bliss didn’t last for long; at 2:16pm, the site went down yet again, prompting the company to post “the issue is on-going” on its status blog. According to the folks at Pingdom, this is the worst crash the site has experienced since October.

In fact, while attempting to write this article, Twitter experienced a few more outages. Like before, we weren’t greeted by the “Fail While” — the sight simply just timed out. Whatever issues the website is currently experiencing, apparently they’re still on-going. In the meantime, I suggest writing down all of the snarky 140-character comments you had planned for today in case you start to forget them. It’s been known to happen.

So what in the world does a person do when Twitter goes down? They apparently do other things for a while, come back to Twitter, see if it’s up, and go back to whatever it is they’re doing. However, once things were back in motion, people started posting their reactions to the outage under #WhileTwitterWasDown. The results, as one might imagine, are pretty entertaining.