Twitter down due to technical fault amid Olympics buzz
Be careful what you tweet. Park Jeong Keun apparently had no idea anything was amiss when he entertained his Twitter followers with satirical sideswipes at North Korea. Park faces a possible prison sentence after being charged with “praising and supporting an enemy of the state” under a law introduced more than six decades ago to protect the new South Korea from communist infiltration.
Twitter's website was down for almost an hour on Thursday due to a technical fault, the BBC reported.
According to BBC, Twitter was still accessible via its mobile site and some third-party applications, but the site itself was inaccessible on the eve of the Olympics.
The Associated Press noted that visitors to the site saw the message: "Twitter is currently down for %(equals) reason %. We expect to be back in %(equals) deadline %"
In a message, Twitter said, "Howdy folks, looks like we're experiencing a small interruption of Twitter.com and some mobile clients."
Reuters reported that Twitter's outage affected users on multiple continents.
The company wrote in a blog post: "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."
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CNET noted that Twitter suffered an outage just last month that left its site inaccessible for about an hour. Outages were frequent in Twitter's early years as its servers coped with skyrocketing growth.
The Daily Telegraph noted that users took to other social media to complain during last month's outage, with one Facebook user saying, "Be honest. Did you spend most of Twitter being down desperately trying to tweet about Twitter being down?"
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CNET said Twitter wasn't the only online service to report problems today, with Google Talk also experiencing an outage earlier in the day.
The Olympics are expected to bring a spike in tweets, said the AP. The European Championship soccer final saw users tweeting 15,000 tweets per second.