Los Angeles – In a surprising turn of events, micro-blogging outfit Twitter has confirmed that some users are currently unable to access the service this evening. Whereas the social network is still available to many, others are being greeted with the message that the network is “over capacity”.
Some visitors to the site reported getting a message that the site was swelling with “over capacity,” an issue Twitter confirmed this evening.
According to TheNextWeb’s Emil Protalinski reporting that he has personally witnessed one fail whale, though the service has overall been quite slow in the last hour or so, and in many cases the sites Web pages simply fail to load altogether. I’m in Canada, but this issue does not appear to be limited to North America; two of my colleagues, Joel Falconer in Australia and Jon Russell in the UK have also been shown the massive marine mammal:
At the time of writing, Twitter has merely posted this announcement:
“Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” the company said in a status update this evening.
However, details are scarce as to what has caused the outage or how extensive the disruption is. But a quick survey of Downforeveryoneorjustme and Downrightnow found that Twitter was being reported as “up” and experiencing “possible service trouble,” respectively.
Nevertheless, this does not seem to be a good month for social networks. Facebook was down in many European countries just last week.
Finally, in a fresh update: “This issue has now been resolved,” according to Twitter’s official status Web page.