Update: Twitter site restored after crash

Computerworld - Twitter said its site is back up and running after an outage worldwide knocked out access for some users for nearly three hours today.

Starting at 10 a.m. Eastern time, Twitter suffered intermittent downtime and slow page loads that affected Web and mobile users around the globe, according to a report on Twitter's status page.

The microblogging site had the problem fixed by 12:50 p.m.

"We apologize to users who were affected by this, and we're working to ensure that similar issues do not occur," Twitter wrote in its status report.

Earlier today, Twitter noted that "some" users were affected by the outage but did not specify how many.

The site has already had two other partial outages this month. According to Twitter's Status page, some users were unable to access the site on Jan. 21. And on Jan. 16, some users had trouble with both Twitter.com and the Twitter mobile app.

Users who were frustrated with Twitter's downtime or just wanted to make light of the crash quickly took to the site once it was back up.

"When Twitter goes down, does anyone else think 'Ha! I'll just tweet something funny about how annoying this is,' and then realise and cry?" tweeted a user identified as TomChivers.

And someone using the handle OhNoSheTwitnt joked, "What'd everyone do to avoid talking to people while Twitter was down[?] I ate an orange and posted a picture of it on Instagram."

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

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