Twitter back up after pre-Olympics crash

Computerworld - Twitter is up-and running for most users after the micro-blogging site was shut down for more than 90 minutes earlier today.

The Twitter shutdown affected users around the world.

Apica, a web performance monitoring company, said Twitter crashed at approximately 11:23 a.m. EDT, returned momentarily around 12:04 p.m, and then crashed again at about 12:15 p.m.

The site was back online for most users around 1:30 p.m., though Apica noted that some "users along both coasts continue to experience problems connecting."

As of 2:45 p.m.. Twitter had not disclosed the cause of the outage on its Status Page, but did note that it is fixed.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the outage.

Once the site was back online, twitter users were quick to express their frustration with the outage.

"Twitter, do not crash again, please," wrote @missbanshee. @OwenJones84 tweeted: "Where were you in the Great Twitter Crash of 2012."

And @john_mcguirk joked: "Twitter could have warned me about this outage before I made that sandwich I was so looking forward to tweeting about."

The crash came a day before the opening ceremonies at the Summer Olympics in London, which is expected to be a prime subject on social networks in the coming days.

In fact, Twitter has created a special page to aggregate tweets from Olympic athletes, coaches and their families, along with sports reporters and announcers.

The Twitter.com/#Olympics page went live today.

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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