Twitter suffers 1-hour outage

Computerworld - Twitter suffered trouble early Friday, when the site homepage crashed for about an hour.

The problem started at midnight EDT and lasted until 1 a.m or 1:15 a.m., said Shawn White, vice president of operations at Keynote Systems, an Internet and mobile monitoring company. White called it a "significant outage."

When Twitter came back online, the site's response time went from a normal two to three seconds to a 30-second wait time for the site to load, White said.

And while the outage came at midnight on the East Coast, it started at 9 p.m. on the West Coast, leaving those Twitter users without service during a normally high usage period, White noted.

"There were some issues with the site last night that were quickly resolved," said a Twitter spokeswoman this morning in an email to Computerworld. She did not explain if a technical problem or a surge in tweets caused the outage.

Once the site came back up, users were quick to voice their frustrations, as well as to make their best guesses as to what might have caused the crash.

Many users blamed a suspected surge in tweets based on the Detroit Tigers eliminating the New York Yankees from the playoffs Thursday night.

PeytonsHead tweeted, "Who hated A-Rod more last night? NYY Fans or Twitter users? #OverCapacity He couldn't bring down DET, but crashed a whole social network." And pwnteam added, "While Twitter was down, there should have been a picture of the Yankees instead of the fail whale."

Other users, however, were just frustrated with the downtime.

JOE_HOLLYWOOD tweeted, "um, finally Twitter isn't down anymore ... get a better server or something, we can't deal with this anxiety!! Lol."

And TheLoveAid tweeted, "That moment when Twitter goes down and everybody is forced to go back on boring Facebook."

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

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