Twitter Back After Morning Downtime

It was a morning without Tweets for many Twitter users, as the popular microblogging service struggled with availability problems. Twitter was down for a total of one hour, 20 minutes this morning, according to Pingdom. When it was responding, there were Fail Whales aplenty informing users that Twitter was overcapacity. The outages this morning followed a shorter period of downtime last night.

"We are experiencing site availability issues — additional latency and errors — this morning," the Twitter team reported on its status blog. "To help stabilize the site we’re turning off a set of features including but not limited to: Twitter Search, hovercards, web sidebar data (trends, friends counts, etc), and profile image uploads." At about 10:30 a.m. Pacific time, Twitter reported that service had returned to normal and it had restored the disabled site features.

The downtime was notable because Twitter's availability challenges are becoming less frequent. Pingdom's tracking shows that Twitter has had uptime of 99.8 percent or better in every month so far in 2010.