Twitter Is Down, Again

Looks like Twitter is down again. We started noticing just little while ago and it’s happening on the Web as well as on its iPhone and iPad apps. Twitter tells us it’s aware of the issue and looking into it.

This is the second time this year that Twitter has faced a multi-country outage. The first was a month ago.

A quick check at “Is it down or just me” gave us this:

This is what we’re seeing on Chrome:

We’ve reached out to Twitter and this is what they say:

“We’re aware of the issue and are looking into it. Will let you know when we have an update.”

The last time Twitter had this problem, in June, the company attributed it to a “cascaded bug.” This means that the problem or bug isn’t confined to a particular software element. Instead, the effect “cascades” into other elements as well.

We will be checking here on Twitter’s developer blog for the latest and updating as we learn more. The current status of services on that page shows that all elements of Twitter’s service, except for “userstream”, are seeing “service disruption,” or in the case of “stream” it is seeing “performance issues.”

The userstream most likely refers to, surprise, a a particular user’s stream of tweets. Although if the rest of the service is not working, there isn’t much use of the user tweets.

Twitter’s downtime comes on the same day that Google also faced its own communication breakdown: the company’s Googletalk service faced a worldwide outage for most of the day, European time. Some parts of it are now getting restored, Google says, and it should be up for everyone “in the near future.”