On Eve Of Olympics, Twitter Goes Down

For the second time in about a month, Twitter is currently experiencing a prolonged outage.

As best we can tell, the outage began around 11:30 am ET. Twitter posted earlier that its “engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” but offered no details about what has caused the problem.

Many Twitter URLs are showing an error message like this:

The timing of any outage is never good, but this one could be particularly embarrassing with the 2012 Summer Olympics already underway (some events) and the opening ceremony happening tomorrow. Twitter and NBC TV just announced a promotional partnership that will give Twitter significant exposure during TV coverage of the games, and the twitter.com/#Olympics hashtage page is expected to launch today.

Postscript: Twitter is now back online for all users, and appears to have returned to normal at around 1:30 pm ET. The company has not yet indicated what caused today’s outage.

Postscript #2: Twitter has published an explanation about today’s outage:

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.