A Twitter outage that lasted several hours on Wednesday was resolved, and the microblogging site appeared to be getting back to normal after a problem with "networking equipment" was fixed. Some users were still having trouble, however, getting onto the site.
"All site features have been re-enabled. Latency and error rates are recovering quickly," Twitter said on its site, adding that a "networking error prevented us from serving at full capacity" for more than three hours.
Twitter has had outages before, but with a growing number of users over the past year — there now are an estimated 65 million "tweets," or 140-character messages, posted every day — more people are paying attention when the free service is down.
Those trying to log into the site earlier in the day were unable to, getting a message that Twitter was “over capacity … Too many tweets!”
To help stabilize the site, Twitter said it turned off some of the site's features including, "but not limited to," Twitter Search, photo uploads, RSS feeds and HoverCards. Those features should be working again.
At least one wag, Dan Abramson of The Huffington Post, penned an obituary, "Twitter Dies at Age 4."
"Twitter, social networking site and killer of human contact, has died today at four years-old," he wrote. "He is survived by Twitpic, Facebook, and even MySpace, who seemed genuinely pleased by the news.
"The cause of death has been tentatively listed as 'over capacity,' though suspicion has fallen on the ill-tempered whale (Twitter's symbol) who first reported the death."
In February, users were "tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day," wrote Twitter's Kevin Weil, who deals with analytics, on the site's blog. "Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day — that's an average of 600 tweets per second."
Recently, a company spokesman estimated that there are now 65 million tweets daily.
In what may be unrelated, Twitter announced Tuesday that it plans to start testing its own way of shortening Web site links posted by users to fit in the 140-character message limit. Various free services, such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com, now do this.
But there have been problems with scammers using the shortened links to send those who click on them to phishing sites in order to obtain personal information or to trigger a computer virus.