Twitter Service Spotty as Looming Olympic Games Overload Servers

The spike in users overwhelmed the San Francisco-based company

Twitter service nosedived Thursday as the number of simultaneous users overwhelmed the micro-blogging site's servers in the lead up to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Users across the planet had trouble accessing the micro-blogging site a day before the start of the games, the Associated Press reported.

Twitter's support team tweeted it was "experiencing a small interruption."

Visitors to the site found a message saying that "Twitter is currently down." 

Slowly loading pages or outages were reported for more than an hour in countries around the world. Some users could still post updates from their phones or third-party applications and tweets about the Olympics still trickled out of London.

Twitter went down at 11:23 a.m. EDT and was "completely down" for 40 minutes before briefly recovering and crashing again at about 12:15 p.m., the AP reported.

During the outage, numerous self-proclaimed "Twitter refugees" flooded Facebook with complaints before rushing back to Twitter and making #WhileTwitterWasDown a trending topic in the United States.

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