Twitter | Why Is Twitter Down? Site Greets New Year With Mass Outage

Twitter Reports 'Some Site Issues'

But when it comes to what's causing Twitter to be down for so long, the Twitter status microblog will only say that there are "some site issues" that "our engineers are working on resolving."

At the moment, the site appears to be fluctuating between periods of working and not-working. Twitter has been in the habit of going through extended outages at least once a year since 2007, when the web site's popularity began to explode.

Why is Twitter Down?

Tech analysts point to the site being chronically over-capacity, especially since thousands of Twitter users keep checking the site or trying to get access the moment the social networking site reappears.

In 2010, issues with Twitter's " timeline cache " caused the site to go down for several hours, an issue that may have been exacerbated by the Twitter revamp introduced to select users this year.

Most likely, however, the reason for the New Year's outage is simply that too many users keep flooding a site that, years on, still has enough network problems not to be able to handle it.

Keep checking back for Twitter updates as site engineers try to fix the problem, or check out status.twitter.com for minute-by-minute info.

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