Twitter Fail Robot heralds an outage for some users

The microblogging site is experiencing some kind of sporadic outage... again.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.

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Elinor Mills

Dec. 14, 2011 2:46 p.m. PT

This message appeared for some Twitter users in San Francisco. Twitter

Twitter experienced sporadic outages this afternoon before being resolved a short time later. Some users reported error messages when trying to use the service, although TweetDeck--owned by Twitter--was still working.

Attempts to access Twitter in San Francisco resulted in a message that displayed the Fail Robot and stated: "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing--we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

Others saw the Twitter Fail Whale and a message saying "Twitter is over capacity."

The site was accessible to visitors in other parts of the country, however.

Via email, a Twitter representative sent a link to status.twitter.com, which states that "Users may be experience[sic] some issues with our service; our engineers are currently working on this issue." The rep's only other comment: "We're looking into it."

The site was back up by 3:30 p.m. and the Twitter status page was updated to include this message: "Update: This issue has been resolved."

All is well in the Twitterverse once again.

Updated 4 p.m. PT with situation resolved