On its status page on Tuesday, Twitter said that it "experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01 a.m." PDT. The downtime occurred during "a planned deploy in one of our core services," and the company said it rolled back "the change as soon as we identified the issue."
A controlled recovery was also undertaken to make sure the rest of the service was stable, and there was a full recovery by 11:47 a.m. PDT.
Twitter watchers have reported that APIs and streams to third-party apps were also affected. Twitter apologized for the inconvenience, and acknowledged that most users were experiencing performance issues via the Web or mobile devices. Issues included loading timelines and the ability to post tweets.
Ironically, the Tuesday outage took place as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was about to take the stage at the South by Southwest media festival in Austin. Twitter was a hit at the festival in 2007.
The previous outage also took place at an inopportune time -- during the Academy Awards on March 2. On that occasion, the company's servers were overwhelmed by retweets of a "selfie" taken by show host Ellen DeGeneres that included many celebrities. When it was taken, DeGeneres announced live on the show that she intended for it to become the most retweeted message ever.
It's not surprising that a celebrity-laden photo would get such huge retweets. Earlier this week, the service announced that an analysis it conducted of millions of tweets by users in a wide range of industries found that media helps.
In a blog post on Monday, the company said that...