Twitter crashes day before Olympics kick off

Computerworld - The day before the opening of the 2012 London Olympics that are expected to light up major social networks, Twitter crashed.

The micro-blogging site went down at approximately 11:45 a.m. EST Thursday, according to Twitter's Status page. The site was restored around 1:15 p.m.

Users from several different parts of the country reported that they were without Twitter service.

The crash came the day before the opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics.

Twitter has created a special page to aggregate the most interesting tweets from Olympic athletes and their families and coaches, as well as from reporters and sports commentators.

The Twitter.com/#Olympics page, at https://twitter.com/olympics, is slated to go live today.

The latest outage comes just a few weeks after Twitter went down twice on June 21.

That outage, blamed on a cascading bug in one of Twitter's infrastructure components, affected Twitter and third party apps running on Android- and Apple iOS-based devices.

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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