Twitter Outage Freezes 'Tweets'

October 9, 2009 9:33 a.m. EST

New York, NY (AHN) - Twitter, the micro-blogging tool used by millions, experienced an outage on Thursday. The service, which also allows users to send tiny messages to friends, suffered a slowdown, causing updates not to publish.

"We are currently investigating a problem causing many users' timelines to be delayed," the company said on its official blog on Thursday. "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter. We have already fixed this bug and are making additional optimizations based on what we learned."

Twitter has experienced growing pains after becoming one of the most popular tools for communication on the web. Users are familiar with the "fail whale," a graphic posted when the site is temporarily overloaded - but overall the service has enjoyed popularity for its ease and accessibility from mobile devices.