Tweetless in Seattle, also New York, San Francisco, etc., etc.

For over an hour, Twitter was down without even a fail whale to warn us.

Twitter, the popular social network went down with a bang sometime around noon Eastern time. According to the Down For Everyone Not Me site, Twitter was down for everyone. After coming up briefly at about 1:15 Eastern, the site is down again.

Usually, when Twitter fails, which doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to, the site comes up with its famous, or infamous, fail whale. Not this time. Indeed, many attempts to reach the site aren't resolving at all.

The problem, however, does seem to be with the site. A check on intoDNS, a Domain Name Service checking site, reveals that Twitter's DNS set-up is still fine and dandy.

Esther Schindler, co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Twitter Marketing, and who had just been getting ready to host a Tweetchat, said, “This demonstrates just how much we have grown to depend on Twitter (and other online services we get for free). It's like discovering that the phone's dial tone is gone... and there's nobody to contact to say "Give me my money back!” Her Tweetchat, by the by, is now rescheduled for July 26.

Twitter, on its status site, had yet to release a full explanation for this massive failure. The only thing we knew at first  is that: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

Three hours later, we're finally getting a bit more of a hint. According to an official Twitter account, "Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We'll provide updated information soon."

Twitter outages are continuing, but after the first hour when the system was completely down, the site seems to be functioning better. At about 1:13 Easternm the site started coming back up for some users. We still don't know exactly why it went down or why the site is continuing to behave eractically.