The Twitter website crashed on Tuesday -- the social network's second outage in the past nine days.
Twitter was down for about an hour yesterday because of complications stemming from a planned upgrade of the site, according to the site's status page.
The problem started around 2 p.m. ET and Twitter quickly posted a statement: "Most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on Web and mobile apps. We're looking into it."
Then a little after 3 p.m., Twitter updated the situation.
"During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01a.m.," Twitter reported. "We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by [2:47am ET]. We apologize for the inconvenience."
The outage came at a lousy time, though as it coincided with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone appearance on a panel at the South by Southwest conference. During the discussion of "our connected society," people were encouraged to ask Stone questions by tweeting them using the hashtag #askbiz.
And people noticed.
"So Twitter went down - hard - during the Biz Stone talk. That is amusing on many levels. #sxsw #BizSTone," tweeted @afairweather.
On March 2, Twitter reported that "some users" were unable to view or post tweets on twitter.com, as well as on Twitter's mobile app for about a half hour.
"Traffic was redirected away from the components that were experiencing problems, and the issue has now been resolved," Twitter noted that day. "We apologize for any inconvenience."
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.
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