Twitter is Down: The Sky is Falling

For the past 30 minutes or so Twitter has been offline and so far there has been no official report on what is happening. The Twitter API server is also reporting itself as unavailable on the Twitter tools, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck interfaces.

Update: The Twitter service went online for a few minutes before going offline again. This is after almost an hour of “seeing too many whales” as stated on Twitter’s status blog. Their on-call team has been working on a fix and seems to have worked working something out.

Update: Twitter status now releases an update saying “We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.”

So much for the world coming to an end: Twitter is now back online.

This is the first time the microblogging service has been down for such a long period of time since August of last year when it was attacked. There are some speculating this is somehow related to the sheer volume of people tweeting since the reported aftershock in Haiti earlier. On a lighter note, another speculation floating around is because of Bill Gates @billgates giving the microblogging service a spin gaining 100,000 followers in less than eight hours.

More updates will be posted after we gather more information.