Twitter Down: Worldwide Blackout Casts Shadow Over Company

This Thursday, Twitter flashed its users back to the dark ages of the microblogging site, when its service was down for a full two hours and reminded "tweeps" of Twitter's recurrent interruptions when the then new company scrambled to accommodate an explosive influx of users. 

This has been Twitter's longest blackout (almost full two hours) experienced by the site's users since the hour-long October 7, 2011, episode that sent “tweeps” around the world in a collective social media meltdown.

The Twitter outage, which forced addicted tweeps to find alternate social media spaces where to complain about…well…Twitter being down, began a few minutes before noon, to return sporadically around 1:00 p.m., blacking out again (oh, that annoying “Fail Whale” meme) less than an hour later.

"Engineers are currently working to resolve the issue," a Twitter spokeswoman told CNNMoney, without elaborating further. In the meantime, the microblogging site updated its blog at 1:42 p.m. saying that issue had been resolved and that all service were “currently operational.” However, they had to contradict themselves less than half and hour later when they updated “the issue is on-going.”

The outage happened just hours after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced the microblogging service will start offering its promoted advertising product in 50 new markets – including Latin America, Brazil and Western Europe – this year, in order to reduce its reliance in the American market and hit its goal of $1 billion in advertising revenue by year 2014.