Twitter is back up after outage – you can all breathe again

26 Jul 2012

A mystery Twitter outage on the eve of the London Olympics has lifted. It was the second major outage the social network has experienced in recent weeks.

The site began to experience problems around 4pm (GMT) but is now back up and running.

About an hour ago, Twitter said: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

It is the second outage since the last major outage on 21 June and happens just 24 hours before the London 2012 Olympics begin.

No one knows what has caused the fault. Signs that things were going awry were evident when URLs weren’t automatically being shortened for tweets.

The site is expected to be a major fulcrum for news and information for the Olympics and as part of a partnership with broadcaster NBC a special trending page has been created to follow the key sports events taking place.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com