If the United States didn’t have enough to worry about – with challenges in the economy and a massive heat wave hitting the Northeast – Twitter (News - Alert) went down on Thursday.
Twitter – the popular micro-blogging site – went down for over 60 minutes on Thursday afternoon, according to media reports. The first outage appears to have happened at 11:59 a.m. ET. It came back on only to crash again.
In addition, Apica reported that Twitter's service first experienced errors at 11:03 a.m. ET and service was back up at 1:08 ET, according to a report from MarketWatch.
"Engineers are currently working to resolve the issue," a Twitter spokeswoman told CNNMoney early Thursday afternoon.
It was not immediately known why the crash took place.
The outage comes several months after an outage lasting about an hour on Oct. 7, according to CNNMoney. Rather than not use social media, users flocked to other networks, such as Tumblr.
There was speculation on the Web that the Twitter outage was linked to a distributed denial of service attack by Anonymous or another group of hackers. An official cause was not released as as of 2:30 p.m. EST.
In its report on the Twitter outage, The Wall Street Journal said the micro-blogging company is “one of the next viable candidates for an initial public offering and has recently stressed the reliability of its service, which was prone to outages in its early days.”
The Twitter site reported as of 2:27 p.m., “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue. Update: The issue is on-going and engineers are working to resolve it.”
Numerous tweets related to the outage. KIRO 7 @KIRO7Seattle tweeted, “Looks like it could be one of those on-and-off days for Twitter.”
Twitter tweeted later on Thursday that the day's outage was "due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components." More information on the cause was expected to be provided soon by the company.
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