Twitter’s Fail Whale Of A Day: Mostly Down Since 12:35 EDT

Screen shot 2012-06-21 at 12.53.55 PM

In what’s sure to piss off most news readers and general web-perusing enthusiasts, Twitter has gone down. We’ve heard reports that it’s been down for the last fifteen minutes, and without access to Twitter, it’s tough to say whether or not the company has given any updates.

A quick visit to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com shows that the site is down across the boards, and of course visiting Twitter.com offers up the same results.

What’s strange is that the usual Fail Whale is missing.

We’ve checked in on Twitter’s blog site and found that they’ve made no mention of the matter yet, but we did see this:

We’re reaching out now to see what exactly the problem is.

The good news is that Twitter’s Mobile site seems to be up and running, so if you’re really desperate to get your Tweet on, get it done on your phone. On the other hand, the iOS app is offering up no joy at the moment.

We’ll keep you updated as we go.

Update: 1:00 EDT — And she’s back.

Update 2: 1:49 EDT — Back down.

Update 3: 3:00 EDT — She’s up again, but there’s no telling how long it’ll last. We’ve been on a roller coaster ride.

Update 4: 3:20 EDT — Twitter has made the following statement regarding what is going on with this massive service disruption. Check it out:

Today’s outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We’ll provide updated information soon.

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) June 21, 2012

Update 5: 4:15 EDT — Twitter has “clarified” what a cascaded bug is, and done so in 140 characters or less:

A cascaded bug has an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element; its effect “cascades” into other elements as well.

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) June 21, 2012

It’s been about three hours since the site formerly known as Twitter went down completely. This is a full-scale outage, people. No fail whale, no cutesy message about how awesome Twitter’s traffic is at the moment, just an error page.

I’ve been refreshing Twitter’s developer site, and it looks like Status and Timeline updates have been going back and forth between “Performance Issues” status (yellow) and “Service Disruption” status (red).

Tweeters seem to be going through a bit of withdrawal, with many wanting desperately to tweet about how Twitter is down. Irony is fun.

In other news, Facebook is probably having a great day.