Twitter's down, Twitter's up, Twitter's ...

July 26th has not been a good day for the Internet. First, Google Talk went down, and now Twitter has crashed.
Reports started coming in at about 11:45 that Twitter, the popular short-message social network had fallen like a house of cards. A quick check at Down for Everyone or Just Me the Website checking site showed that Twitter was indeed down.
Then, since there was no immediate news from Twitter about the failure on its main site or Twitter's Blogger site, there was some question as to whether if there was connection between the Google Talk failure and Twitter's problems because of London Olympic Internet traffic, broad Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack or some other Internet-wide trouble.
That's not the case. Arbor Networks ATLAS Global Internet threat  index is showing a normal number of attacks and threats. In turn, the Internet Traffic Report shows that while Internet performance isn't great, it's not awful either. Asia, Europe, and North America are all in the yellow range, which isn't unusual. While Asia's Internet traffic jam is growing worse, the rest of the world's Internet traffic appears to be steady.
Esther Schindler, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Twitter Marketing  is really bothered by Twitter's latest mishap. “There's some part of me that looks at Twitter downtime as, "Oh good, I can get work done now without distraction." And then I realize... I can't get as much work done. I depend on Twitter for what I do. It's the source of information -- general news, tech news, baseball trades (well okay maybe that's not work-related) -- and an important way I keep in touch with people. For some of my contacts I have ONLY their Twitter IDs."
So what is going on? The problem seems to be with Twitter itself. Around noon, Twitter got online long enough to report “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”
There are no details at this time about what has happened. In June 2012 Twitter went down because of a “cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components.” Twitter did it to themselves that time because of a software update gone terribly wrong. With the Olympics almost upon us it seems unlikely that Twitter would try a major update today.
This time? Well, at this point your guess is as good as mine.  This go-around, with more than a hour already gone by , Twitter's problem seems to be more significant. The site does, however, seems to be coming up for some people. Let's hope it's up for everyone soon.
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No hackers: Twitter outage caused by 'cascaded bug'
Google Talk: Down and out in Google IM, VoIP, & video-conferencing