The Twitter micro-blogging website is currently down and unavailable to users in America and Europe.

Twitter Outage
Twitter

The website that is usually displayed at Twitter.com currently shows a plain white page with the message: "Twitter is currently down for <%= reason %>. We expect to be back in <%= deadline %>."

A further message on the official Twitter status page states: "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

The outage appears to be affecting users on both sides of the Atlantic as users in both Europe and the US say they are unable to load the website.

Twitter is often a victim of outages although they usually only last for a brief period of time.

A crash that lasted two hours on 21 June, 2012 is believed to have been the longest the service has ever been offline.

Twitter said the June outage was caused by "a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components" and it was two hours before it posted the message: "The issue has stabilized and all services are restored."

At the time a hacker claiming membership with the UGNazi hacker group claimed responsibility for a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack but a Twitter spokesman later denied the claim that the service had been forced offline.

The latest Twitter outage comes on the same day that an earlier problem on Google Talk left users unable to log on to the instant messaging client.

Google confirmed that its IM service crashed for "a majority of users" across the globe.

The affected users were able to access Google Talk but were met with error messages and other "unexpected behavior" Google reported.

Twitter recently announced that there were more tweets about the Olympics on a single day in the build-up to the 2012 Games than there were during the entire Beijing Games.

Users posted more than 15,000 tweets-per-second during the Euro 2012 final between Spain and Italy, which set a sports-related record for the social network.

Twitter