There were reports of widespread outages of Twitter’s main Web site Saturday, with speculation centering on the problems stemming from a flood of New Year’s greetings.
We asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back. “Our engineers have identified the issue and Twitter is now almost fully recovered,” Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner said in an email at 4:30 p.m. ET Saturday.
By 2:50 p.m. ET, MSNBC was reporting that the site was “slowly coming back online” and there seemed to be few problems with accessing the site and posting messages by 4:15 p.m. ET. The only official indication from Twitter that something was amiss came Saturday morning, when the company posted “Users may currently be experiencing some site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue” on its status microblog.
If the site goes down again — particularly as you hope to send out your New Year’s tweets as the calendar turns in your part of the world — try using an app or the mobile site. Some users reported success posting messages using clients like HootSuite, TweetCaster and Twitter’s own TweetDeck during the earlier outage.