Twitter's Pre-Olympic Crash Sparks Concerns
The social media site went dark for two hours Thursday—leaving users without a place to complain about the outage.
| Posted Thursday, July 26, 2012, at 2:13 PM
Photo by Douglas E Curran/AFP/GettyImages.
Twitter users the world over watched helplessly on Thursday around 11:00 a.m. eastern as their feeds ground to a sudden halt—and most couldn't even tweet about it.
Since news of the popular social media site’s blackout couldn’t spread in the normal way (through Twitter), the Associated Press sounded the alarm that "people across much of the planet" lost access when the site crashed for about two hours on Thursday.
Users across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa reported outages, although a fortunate few reportedly could still send the 140-character messages from their phones.
The outage comes just a day before the Olympics kick off with the opening ceremony in London, sparking concern about how the micro-blogging site will hold up throughout the 2012 games. Past experience show sports tend to draw heavy traffic to Twitter. During Spain’s victory in the Euro 2012 match, some 15,000 tweets went out every second.
Just six weeks ago, Twitter experienced a major outage when one of the site’s infrastructure components was thwarted by a cascaded bug, which, ABC News translates for us, means "major technical difficulties."
Thursday is proving to be a rough one for social media users across the web. Google Talk crashed this morning, damaging some other Google applications as it fell, Mashable reports.
